


When You Rise

by Lionescence



Series: When You Rise [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Multiple, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, past trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-09-13 20:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9141022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lionescence/pseuds/Lionescence
Summary: For a year Keith waited for Shiro. Now Shiro waits for Keith, haunted by his newly-returned memories of their relationship, praying to whoever who would listen for his baby to wake up.He's not the only one struggling. And when Keith does wake up, the Voltron family are up to the task of dealing with the changes that follow. Because that's what families do.





	1. Fall Away

**Author's Note:**

> So, here's my first Voltron fanfic. I've been stewing and angsting and getting excited over this story for weeks now, and I'm glad to have finally got the first chapter done. The first chapter is like a setting establishment chapter, so that everything that happens in later chapters follows from that, and may not be as long and as frantic. 
> 
> I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I have dreaming it up. Kudos and comments are appreciated. 
> 
> Have fun.

They were dead. That was what mattered. That was all that mattered, Keith thought, helpless, breathless, as he tore his dagger out of the Galra’s eye socket. The dagger that was the last and only piece of him had saved him. Bought him time while he went back for his bayard and drove the shining blade home, between the ribs and up.

They were dead. That was the only thing that mattered. It was a mantra as he put his bodysuit back together, as he cradled his sprained — fractured, broken? — left wrist to his chest, as the bruises on his hips deepened and the pain burned and burned and —

He dropped to his hands and knees and threw up.

Like last time. But not like last time. This time they were dead. That was what mattered.

Slowly he was aware of Red, calling for him, asking him to answer, to please please tell her he was all right, that the Galra captain hadn’t —

“I’m okay, Red,” he said aloud, throat raw. He hadn’t allowed himself to scream. He couldn’t endanger Hunk who was also on board the vessel. _I’m okay_ , he repeated, reaching out to sooth her.

The Red Lion growled, unhappy, unbelieving. She _knew_. She knew _everything_. It had been her roaring in his head that had given him that one burst of strength, one inhuman reach and thrust that set him loose. It had been her anger, her fury of _how dare you touch him_.

 _They’re dead_ , he told her. _That’s all that matters. No one has to know. No one._

Red whined, keened at him. It wasn't rage now.

It was heartbreak.

 _I’m sorry_. He was shaking, sliding his dagger back in its sheath, collecting his fallen helm from the floor and putting it back on. The comms were still out: his cheekbone had shattered it when the Galra had smashed him against the wall, before he —

_I should have been stronger, Red. I’m sorry._

A low rumble came through, spreading from the base of his skull down his spine, curling around his chest like an embrace. She said nothing, only showed him where Hunk was, and the quickest way to get to him. Yellow had told her where.

It was only when Keith stood that he felt it, and he nearly doubled over to the floor again.

He looked down at his left flank, where the hilt of a Galra dagger stuck out of him. The blade was fully embedded. A slow trickle of blood dampened his suit, but nothing more. “Shit.” It must have been during the fight. He’d been so intent to escape, reach his bayard. The adrenaline had probably blocked out the pain of the stab.

Raising his right arm, he activated the scanner on his suit. He wasn’t stupid; pulling the dagger out would make things worse. But if he had to take it with him, he had to make sure there were no trackers. He felt around the wound, and as far as he could tell, the blade hadn’t hit anything vital.

“Yeah. The sooner I’m out of here, the better,” he breathed. “Take me to Hunk, Red. Safe as we can.”

Just as when he first found her, what felt like forever ago, he felt a pull, a breadcrumb trail that shone yellow. Back then it had been red. Before even that, it had been a pale blue river in the dark vastness of the desert.

He was quick and quiet. He couldn’t risk being seen, couldn’t risk a fight this time because there was no way he could activate his shield with his injured left wrist. His best bet was to get to Hunk, back him up as best he can and get the hell out.

He found the engine room, and Hunk within, setting up their latest brand of explosives. He’d worked with Pidge on a combination that would take out the engines, halting pursuit, and a burst of EMP would neutralise the weapons systems long enough for them to beat a hasty retreat while the other Lions took out all the smaller ships.

“Keith! Buddy, where have you been!” Hunk stood and raced to him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “You weren’t answering your comms!”

Keith winced at the overenthusiastic treatment. “Ran into some trouble. Galra squad. Wrecked my comms. They won’t be bothering us.”

“You look like hell. Wait. Is that a dagger —”

“— you see before you? Yes. ‘Fraid so.”

Hunk blinked. “Dude. The one time you’re funny is right _now?_ ”

The Red Paladin shrugged, allowing a weak smile. “I never said timing was my strong point.”

“Stupid question, but does it hurt?” Hunk reached out, almost wanting to touch it, but didn’t.

“Stings like a bitch, but it’s kinda really in there. Feels like the base of the blade might be barbed, so yanking it out might be a bad plan. I scanned it though, and there doesn’t seem to be any devices attached that’ll be a problem if it has to, you know, come with me.”

Hunk turned back to his work, clipping wires and pressing buttons. “Hell of a souvenir. Okay, I’m nearly done, and then we can jet.”

Keith nodded, kept his eye on the door. They weren’t far from their point of entry. They would be out soon, and he could put this behind him. He’d done it before. And this time, they were dead. It would be okay.

Only then, with a sudden rip and tear, it wasn’t.

 

 

 

It was the strangled gasp that caught Hunk’s attention, that nearly whipped his head off his shoulders. “Keith?”

It was the blade, protruding from the Red Paladin’s thigh, bright and glistening with sticky blood, that made him move. “Keith!

Keith didn’t seem to acknowledge that there was a brand new blade coming from inside him. Wide-eyed, mouth parted noiselessly, he inhaled a pained breath and fell towards the Yellow Paladin.

Hunk just about caught him, narrowly avoiding nicking himself on the wicked edge. Blood flowed steadily now, running down the blade and Keith’s leg. “Hang on, just hang on, okay? You hear me?”

He felt Keith nod against his shoulder, and he clicked on his comms.

“Shiro, we got a problem. Keith is hurt, I’m taking him in Yellow. Clear a way for us.”

“No, Hunk,” Keith said, through gritted teeth, trying to push away to stand. “I can take Red. Don’t… I’ll just slow you down.”

“No can do, little buddy,” Hunk said, pulling the detonator free from his belt and tucking it firmly in his hand. He bent forwards, then easily picked Keith up off the floor, cradling him carefully. “Shiro, you copy that?”

The Black Paladin’s voice came through. “Copy. How bad is it, Hunk?”

Hunk looked down. Down at the dagger hilt in Keith’s side, at the fresh blade that had suddenly appeared, at the pool of blood at their feet.

“Bad,” he said, swallowing past the tightness in his throat. “I don’t even know — we need a pod.”

 

 

 

**_Paladin. My Paladin. Stay with me._ **

_Red?_

**_Stay awake. Stay with your Yellow Paladin. See how bright he is. Feel how warm. Hold to him._ **

_So much… there’s so much…_

**_Hush. Stay with me._ **

_It hurts…_

**_I will let nothing happen to you._ **

_You couldn’t have done anything, Red…_

**_No. I will let nothing happen to you. No more. You are strong. I chose you because you are strong. You are mine._ **

_Red?_

**_Ask of me. Ask of me anything you will. You came to me. I waited so long and you were there. I am here. Ask._ **

_Shiro. I want… Shiro. I need him back._

**_The Black Paladin?_ **

_Please. I’m scared…_

 

 

 

Hunk flew like the world was ending and he was trying to outrun it. He wasn’t the best pilot of the five of them, he knew that. He never, ever dreamed otherwise. But right now he _had_ to be the best, had to get back to the Castle, had to outrun the fighters that came after him in the wake of the explosion on board the main vessel. Had to absolutely, utterly trust that he only needed to keep his eyes ahead of him and let Shiro, Lance, and Pidge wreak havoc behind him, giving him a smooth line home.

No one seemed to question the fact that Red was flying on her own. It wasn’t the first time — that was how she and Keith came together, after all, swallowing him up from certain death in empty space — but she flew as if Keith was still aboard, with the same deftness and agility. Another time, Hunk would wonder where Red ended and Keith began.

He was almost at the hangar when Keith screamed behind him.

“Just a little longer!” Hunk didn’t dare look back, not even when pained whines filled the cockpit, something close to sobbing reaching his ears. “We’re nearly in. Just gonna dock —”

Yellow barely set down when Hunk launched himself away from the command seat and made his way back to Keith. Somewhere out there Red had landed, too, but he couldn’t be sure.

He was too busy trying to figure out where a second blade had come from, the tip punching its way out through Keith’s stomach. “What the — _how?_ Keith!”

“Same… blade,” Keith bit out. “This thing, it’s splitting. Fuck —” He threw his head back and let out another cry as the metal pressed further out of him with a wet, tearing sound.

That did it. A lifetime ago, Hunk would have thrown up in a corner and hoped that whatever was happening wasn’t happening. But not now, not this Hunk. This Hunk bent down and collected the Red Paladin in his arms, ignoring the damp armour, the slick floor. Keith felt smaller all of a sudden, even though he’d held him only a little while ago back on the Galra warship. Now he was shaking, whimpering, and Hunk had to, _needed to_ , protect him.

“Come on, Sunshine! Let us out, nice and easy!”

There was a shift as Yellow lowered her head close to the ground, low between her massive paws, allowing him to run out as fast as he dared with Keith in his arms, into the hangar, out through the doors and straight to the med bay.

He barrelled past Coran and Allura, who’d come to receive him, didn’t slow down when he heard Shiro call after him. They couldn’t get Keith into a pod with this… thing inside him, but the closer he was to one when they got it out, the better. If they could get it out.

A part of his brain had worked out the weapon’s angle of entry. From there, worked out how the first blade made it’s way from flank through the thigh, how the second worked a straight path out the abdomen.

Two blades set at those angles didn’t seem balanced.

Keith’s breathing hitched, something shuddering hard in his chest.

Sometimes, Hunk hated the way his brain worked. Because he was right: two blades at those angles weren’t balanced. Add a third blade, however, and extrapolate the angle…

He ran faster.

 

 

 

Shiro had never seen Hunk move so quickly.

He also couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen so much blood. He didn’t want to imagine what it looked like inside Yellow’s cockpit, judging by the macabre trail that led from her maw out of the hangar.

Pidge shot past him before he could catch her.

“Pidge, wait!”

Lance drew up next to him, waves of panic rushing off him. “Shit. Shit, man, oh my god. That’s all _Keith_?”

Shiro grabbed Lance by the shoulder, spinning him to face him. “Listen to me, Lance. If this is bad, I need you to take care of Pidge. Do what you have to, understand?”

“O-okay, yeah,” Lance said, nodding. “Let’s go.”

By the time they caught up with everyone else at the med bay, it was chaos. Coran and Allura were practically ripping Keith’s armour off him, the pieces scattered around the room. Hunk still held him in his arms on the floor, which was slowly darkening with blood. Pidge had curled herself around the Red Paladin, wild tears and calls of Keith’s name drowning everything else out.

Shiro struggled to keep his head, pushing back any and all memories of the violence of the arena. It took a few breaths but soon he found his focus and steadied himself, a calm like cold rock settling over him. If he felt anything at all, it was an odd, incessant cloying, as if he was meant to be reacting differently.

As if he was forgetting something.

“Lance, get Pidge outta here!” he barked, sharp and clear and undeniable. Lance moved like someone had shot him, quickstepping around pieces of armour and blood and bandages and grabbing Pidge by the collar with one hand, wrapping his free arm around her middle to pick her up.

“No, no, I want to stay with him!” Pidge screamed, nearly kicking her way out of Lance’s grip. “What are you doing! No! _Keith!_ ” She was a raging cat, trying to get free, but Lance held on, manhandling her out of the med bay, and Shiro slammed the panel to lock the doors.

He could still hear Pidge shouting on the other side, but he shut that out of his head. He stepped towards the grisly scene and was about to ask Hunk what happened when he saw the hilt of the weapon.

And froze.

He’d seen it before. He knew what it could do. He’d seen what it could do. He remembered the screaming, the sounds, the _tearing_.

“Hunk, you were right! There’s a third blade!” Coran called from where he stood, tablet in hand running scans.

“Well how are we gonna get it out if it’s got him from three angles?!”

“Hold him down!” Allura called out, her sleeves spattered with red.

Shiro would never forget the way Keith sounded at that moment as his back arched and a full flat of a blade tore through his abdomen. The shriek bounced around the walls of the room and everything felt like it had turned to ice. He couldn’t tell if it was echoing, or if Keith was screaming again.

The cloying, nudging thing at the back of his mind keened.

Pidge’s voice broke through the walls. “MATT!”

He dropped to his knees quickly, shoving Hunk’s arm out of the way. “I know this weapon. I’ve seen it. It’s… Coran, how far out is the third blade?”

It was so hard. So hard to look at the weapon, at the blood, at the cloths and bandages Allura and Hunk were pressing to the wounds to stem the flow, and not look at Keith. To not see how he’d bitten through his lip from the pain, how he was paler than he’d ever known, rendering his eyes dark and glassy, tears flowing freely down his cheeks. To not hear the sobs and whimpers of someone he knew to be so strong.

“If we don’t stop it soon it’s going to puncture his lung,” Coran replied.

“It’s working on a delay,” Shiro said, keeping his voice even. “As it loses power it releases the blades one by one.” His brow furrowed, looking hard at the hilt, trying to recall something else he knew about the weapon. Damn him and his fractured memory! Why did it have to elude him when he needed it? He may be the only one who could stop this from killing his teammate.

When Keith went still and let out a wide-eyed, pained gasp, he remembered.

“Oh no.”

 

 

 

Keith didn’t know how, but he knew something had changed. Something started at his side, where the blade seemed to now live, and was seeping into his body. He felt it coursing through his veins, and it made him wonder, darkly, how he had enough blood to carry it.

Red rumbled in his mind, somewhere, whispering nothing and everything. She’d been solid and brave but now even she faltered. She was as scared as he was. She was asking him to hold on, to be strong, and he didn’t want to fail her. She needed him. She chose him and she _needed_ him. And he needed her.

It began as a prickling, stinging sensation. It rose and ebbed, thudding alongside his frantic heart. It needled at him with each stuttering breath, poking, prodding before growing sharper and more vicious.

And when it exploded, his mind went white, his body caught fire, and nothing could have stopped the sound that tore out of his throat.

 

 

 

Lance held on to a shaking, sobbing Pidge with everything he had. She’d quit fighting, instead shifting her ferocity to sinking her fingers as deep into his arms as she could, as if she would be sucked out into space if she didn’t.

They were a bundle on the floor, his back against the locked med bay, knees drawn up to support Pidge. He’d stopped hushing her, stopped saying stuff and nonsense to calm her down. He didn’t ask why she’d called for her brother, or why she was still alternating between his name and Keith’s. There was nothing more he could do but hold her and pray.

What was there for him to do?

Hunk had compassion that overrode his fear. Besides the Alteans he probably had the best field medicine skills of the five of them. Shiro was their leader, he always knew what to do. He’d fix it. He’d fix it, right?

Pidge would have solved everything by now if she weren't so upset. She was so smart, so quick. She could... probably build something that would help. That would work. She’d tweak the healing pods so Keith would heal quicker, better. Of course she would.

Keith. He was the strongest of all of them. Even Shiro. Though he would never admit that out loud. Not even to himself. Keith had to pull through. _He had to._

Lance didn’t know what his chances were of ever going home if Keith didn’t.

If Keith couldn’t pull through, how could _he_?

When another horrific sound that could not have been — _should not have been_ — human, let alone Keith, penetrated the closed door, Lance buried his face in Pidge’s hair and began his prayers anew.

 

 

 

“It’s a neurotoxin,” Shiro said through gritted teeth, putting all his weight into holding Keith down as he kicked and thrashed. He motioned for Hunk to move over and support Keith’s right side instead, eyes set on Allura who grappled with his legs. “If the blades don’t hit anything vital, it… sets off all the pain receptors. Pushes them into a panic, makes the heart go crazy so they bleed out faster.

“I think I can reset it. I’m not sure…” He raised his Galra arm, pushing enough power into it to draw an eerie purple glow. He could open Galran doors. He could activate Galran systems. Could he —?

“We haven’t got time!” Hunk wailed. “He’s either going to bleed to death or go into shock! If you have a plan, get to it!”

Would it even help? Would it make it worse?

A short wounded noise cut through his thoughts, and his eyes widened as he watched Keith cough up blood. The third blade had hit home.

Shiro leaned forward then, cupping Keith’s face in his hands. “Keith. Keith, can you hear me? Look at me, buddy. Come on.”

He couldn’t stop the way his heart swelled when Keith obeyed, slowly opening his eyes, tipping his head towards his voice. Pain dulled his violet eyes, but the crease in his brow told Shiro he was trying to focus. A thin line of blood ran from the corner of his mouth onto his palm, blocking out a spot of purple light.

“Listen to me. I think — I think I can stop this. But it’s gonna hurt, okay? You trust me?”

There was the barest movement against his hand, a nod. Before he could pull it away, he heard, very softly:

“Takashi.”

Shiro’s lungs seized. His heart went still. And the thing clawing at the back of his mind broke through.

 

 

 

_“Takashi?” The cadet frowned slightly, a single eyebrow raised. “Really.”_

_“Well, yeah.”_

_The cadet puffed a little snort, the frown now a half-smile. “Dunno. That sounds even more formal than Shiro.”_

_“I can name three people who call me that, and two of them made me.”_

_“Oh so I’m special now, am I?” And the full smile was like the sun, a beam of light that skipped into his eyes and made them sparkle. He relished the way his nose crinkled as he bent his head down to drop a kiss upon its tip._

_“You were always special, Keith.”_

_“Takashi! Stop it!” Keith squealed, trying to wriggle away. “This is_ not _fair!”_

_“All’s fair in a scrap, baby,” Shiro laughed as he dug his fingers into Keith’s ribs, earning another squeak he would never have associated with the prickly, self-assured pilot. He dropped his full weight on him, pinning him to the mat._

_“I am betrayed,” Keith huffed. “You… sanctimonious_ ass _. You go on and on about fighting fair and equal footing and all that bullshit and first chance you get you —_ yeek _!”_

_Shiro had rolled them until they were a mess of limbs on the mat. Their practice staves lay forgotten on the other side of where they were scrapping. He had Keith still pinned under him, but his arms were trapped between their bodies._

_“Idiot,” Keith growled. “Now what? Can’t tickle me now, can you?”_

_Shiro grinned. “And this is where you find out how dexterous my toes are.”_

_“What? No! Nononononono you motherfu— TAKASHI!”_

_“Takashi.” Never had his name sounded so cold._

_“Keith, I was going to tell you.”_

_“How? How exactly were you ever going to tell me before everyone else knew? You go away for a week and the first I hear your name you’re going to Kerberos!”_

_“Keith, baby —”_

_“No, no._ I’m _the idiot. How could I have not guessed? If even_ you _had no idea where your meetings this last week were then_ of course _it was fucking classified. And how many damned things that have been going round are classified? One. Kerberos. Fuck’s sake I can’t even do basic math!”_

_Keith didn’t resist when Shiro collected him into a hug, even if it felt as though he was holding a poised snake. He rubbed his shoulders down, fingers catching at the loose hairs at the nape of his neck. Slowly he felt Keith relax, shake his head, take a slow, deep breath._

_“Kerberos, Takashi…”_

_“I know. I know.“ He tightened his hold on him, pulling him closer. Keith kept his arms between them, hands clutching at his shirt, as if the act alone would stop the mission from going forward. When he rested his head against his broad chest, Shiro brought a hand up to the back of his head, stroking his hair, kissing it and taking in the clean, windswept smell that was Keith. He made himself remember the feeling of the growing damp spot on his shirt, because damn him for making his boyfriend cry._

_“It’s not forever, Keith. I’ll come home. We’ll be okay.”_

_“Takashi…”_

_Keith was perfect. Perfect pale skin than shone against his own. Perfect bruised lips from what felt like hours of kissing, the tiniest smile playing in the shadows. That perfect shade of blown-out violet that was so otherworldly it reminded him of the desert sky he would soon leave behind, and he would know the stars lived in those eyes._

_Shiro drove forward, watched those eyes slip shut, the head tip back baring the smooth slope of neck, hair fanning out on the pillow like an inky halo. He buried his nose in the curve where shoulder met neck, breathing deeply, committing that scent to memory: of stormy skies, warm desert earth, lightning, home. He felt so selfish, like he was taking more than he was leaving behind._

_But he could give him this. He would always give him this._

_He slid one hand to a hip, raised the other to comb his fingers through silky strands that he was going to miss so damned much, cupping the back of his head gently, like he could break, like he was fragile and precious and_ everything _._

_Shiro drew back, then surged up again, and the breathless hiccup that huffed past his ear was the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard._

_“I’ve got you,” he murmured, trailing kisses along Keith’s jaw. “I’ve got you. Shiro loves you, baby.”_

_He would remember this. The whispers, the feeling of Keith’s fingertips bruising into his back, the way he trembled in his arms. That secret, sinful smile. This moment would keep his heart warm, his sanity clear, for the journey to Kerberos and back again. He would always remember this._

_“Takashi. I lo—”_

 

 

 

“Shiro!”

It felt like he’d been dropped out of a wormhole, the jolt was so strong. That bizarre relief/pain of another piece of him slotting violently into place. There was a moment of frozen clarity: this wasn’t just a memory, or a shard of his fractured half-formed self. This was a piece of his _soul_.

God. Oh dear god. How could he _forget?_

“Shiro, his vitals are falling!” Coran yelled, frantically waving his tablet about. “Do what you have to, or all will be for nothing!”

_No. I just got him back. I just got him back._

Shiro grasped the hilt of the blade with his Galra hand, fighting back his nerves, his memories of this weapon. With his other hand, he cradled Keith’s head, lifting it just enough so he could see his eyes. “Baby? Keith, baby, listen to me. Listen. Focus on me. Come on. Come on, baby.”

He swore there was a flicker of light behind the glassy dullness, something still burning that hadn’t been swallowed up by pain. He held on to that light, begged it to stay.

“I’m gonna do it now, okay? It’s going to hurt like all motherfuck but I need you to hold on.”

Keith had the gall to quirk a corner of his mouth upwards at Shiro’s slip into profanity. The bastard. That was his baby, right there.

Then Shiro powered up his arm, sending energy back into the weapon. He watched Keith slam his eyes shut, grit his teeth, but he made no sound.

“Coran, I need you to tell me what the blades are doing. Hunk, as soon as the blade is out of his lung get the oxygen on him, he’ll need help. Allura, you’re on the other two. Keep his bleeding down as much as you can.”

If any of them had noticed the change in his demeanor, they said nothing.

“Something’s shifting, Number One! Give it a little more if you can!” Coran called.

Shiro nodded. “You hear that, baby? A little more, okay? You’ve got this.” He pushed more power through, and this time Keith whimpered, his hand coming up to clutch at Shiro’s human arm.

The neurotoxin was still working, but soon Coran reported the third blade had retracted, and Hunk quickly got the oxygen mask on his teammate. It brought an illusion of comfort; the mask muffled any further sounds of agony. The only indication of how he was doing came from how much harder Shiro felt him grip his arm. They watched with morbid fascination as the blade sticking out of Keith’s abdomen slowly retracted, Allura quick slap one of those Altean bandages that they hadn’t figured out how they worked quite; all they knew was that the stuff would staunch bleeding and semi-cauterize a wound, enough to buy time to get to the cryopods.

The irony of the pods being five feet away was not lost on them.

Hunk had pulled his gloves off by now, getting a better read of Keith’s condition. He shook his head. “He’s struggling, Shiro,” he said, dragging a large hand through Keith’s sweat-soaked hair. “We need to hurry —”

“We all need to hold,” Shiro spat. “Otherwise this thing will tear him apart.” He could feel the way Keith’s chest stuttered and shuddered, the squeeze-release on his arm getting weaker. He knew shock would settle in soon.

“Second blade is away and the last one is retracting.”

“Vitals?”

He could hear the frown in Coran’s voice. “Not good.”

Shiro heard his name — _Takashi_ — just in that moment, and his eyes snapped up to meet Keith’s.

“I can’t,” he wheezed behind the oxygen mask, shaking his head. “I can’t, Takashi. Hurts… hurt so much.” He swallowed down a loud whimper, body shaking at the effort. “Please… I can’t…”

_I’m not losing him, not now. I just got him back._

“Just a little more, baby,” Shiro said, fingers curling tighter into the hair on the back of Keith’s head. “I promise. It’ll be okay. You’re strong. You can do this.”

He watched Keith squeeze his eyes shut, pain rising in his voice, shake his head. Watched tears slip down his face. He didn’t know a newly-reassembled heart could shatter again so quickly.

Allura reached over to place another Altean bandage to the wound in Keith’s thigh, sighing wide-eyed as she did. “Amazing. That only just missed his femoral artery. It could have killed him.”

“We could still lose him, Princess,” Coran cautioned. “Shiro, do what you must.”

Shiro couldn’t stop the growl leaving his throat, the tightening in his chest. What could he do? No, that was a lie. There was something. He just didn’t want to do it. He couldn’t bear to bring himself to. But even as that thought crossed his mind he felt Keith’s grip on him go limp, fall away altogether, and his body jerked violently, breaths coming too fast, much too fast.

“Shiro, he’s crashing!”

“Goddammit!” He looked over his shoulder. “Coran, show me the fucking scan!”

He didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, which plummeting numbers meant what, what sharp rises and falls in graphs meant. All he focused on was the image of the blade within Keith’s body, its shape and angle. Vaguely he registered Hunk telling him there was no time, that Keith wasn’t responding anymore. He had a call to make.

“Keith? Baby?”

His blood ran cold when Keith didn’t reply, when he saw that even though his body thrashed against the pain, his eyes were blank and unseeing. He’d seen this before, remembered when he didn’t understand what was happening when one of the other arena combatants returned with the same blade lodged in their side, a non-fatal wound. Remembered when the neurotoxin hit them, how they’d gone mad with pain before the three blades practically bisected them.

_No. No no no._

“God, baby, I’m so sorry.”

Shiro took his hand away from Keith’s head, letting it fall against Hunk’s lap. That hand pressed around the entry wound, caging the blade, before he gave one last, huge pulse of energy through his Galra hand and ripped the blade out completely, flinging it across the room in a bloody, messy arc.

He would hear that last scream for a very long time.

 

 

 

Everything around him was fracturing, crumbling. He backed away, ran, stumbled, and everything was caving in. It was too much. He couldn’t. _He couldn’t._

**_My Paladin._ **

_Red! Red, I can’t! I don’t know what’s happening! What’s happening to me?_

**_Do what your instincts are telling you to do._ **

_But I don’t know what that means! I don’t know what will happen —_

**_You will be safe. I will make sure of it._ **

_Red — !_

**_I will be here. I will not leave you._ **

More cracks formed, but Keith let himself go, let himself fall into whatever it was he meant to do. He sank, almost too gently for the violence around him, felt himself enveloped, and then there was nothing at all.

 

 

 

It took both Hunk and Allura to hold him back when Keith’s heart stopped. Hunk had to tackle him to the ground, pinned him until Coran could get his kit together to restart the Red Paladin’s heart, and he’d nearly kicked the Yellow Paladin off until Allura joined in after bandaging the horrible, gaping wound that the blade had left behind.

The bandage did very little to hide the damage.

Even through the surface of the cryopod, Shiro could see that it would not heal well. He’d torn a chunk of flesh off when he pulled the blade free, though he hadn’t cared to see exactly how much, and how badly. His best clue came when he heard Hunk finally throwing up in a corner.

All that mattered was that somehow, Keith was alive, and safely ensconced in a healing pod.

How long for, neither Allura nor Coran could say for sure. To fix the wrecked muscle and tissue: probably days. Internal damage: less than one. Shiro didn’t ask about the state of Keith’s mind from the neurotoxin, if it had survived unfathomable amounts of pain.

He didn’t know if there was an answer, and if there was, if he wanted to hear it.

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, only that Allura had sent Hunk off to take care of himself, and that maybe — he wasn’t entirely sure — Coran had asked him if he needed anything. Right now he was alone, staring at a quiet, lifeless Keith, suspended in the cool blue glow. He swore he could see Keith’s black hair drift and sway every so lightly, as if he was underwater.

He ached to touch that hair again.

How could he forget? How dare he?

He reached out, only for his hand to meet cold crystal. Still, he traced the line of Keith’s jaw, the curve of his cheekbone — he would kill whoever, whatever had left that awful ugly bruise there — and wished he could feel that warm smooth skin under his own again. He opened his mouth, wanting to say something, anything.

All he managed, before he sank to his knees, was to kiss his own fingertips and run them against where Keith’s lips would be if only there wasn’t Altean technology between them. “Shiro loves you, baby.”

Only then did he rage, and scream, and cry.

 

 

 


	2. Pidge

“Hey, Pidge? You got a minute?”

Pidge looked up from her workstation, finding Keith standing by the door of the workshop. He held his tablet in his hand, a soft set to his shoulders. She shook her head, smiling. “Lemme guess. You got word that I downloaded a whole bunch of stuff for Lance and now you want a piece of the action? I can hit you up.”

He stepped in, cautious, as if he was worried that he might knock into something important, nevermind that he didn’t necessarily understand half of it. Keith was a pretty decent mechanic when it came to engines and maintenance, but the inventive stuff was all her and Hunk. It blew her mind — quite figuratively — when she found out he had a knack for explosives. That was when it became her and Keith, and Hunk would beat a hasty retreat out of the room.

_“I was pretty decent in Chemistry. And there were a lot of MacGyver reruns while I was growing up…”_

_“You know like 75% of that stuff is —”_

_“Mythbusted. I know. Don’t ruin my childhood, Pidge.”_

“So what’ll it be? Some Lady Gaga? Shakira? Porn?” She watched Keith arch an eyebrow, take three seconds of disbelief, then shake his head.

“Suddenly I know too much about Lance. No, I, ah. Actually…”

 It always intrigued Pidge whenever Keith was like this. Like he was arguing with himself about whether or not to let his walls down. It intrigued her because it was nice to see him more vulnerable and less like the warrior he expected himself to be. 

“I miss my books,” he said, at last. “I was wondering if you could somehow get some of them for me.”

“More books?” Pidge asked, taking his tablet from him. “You already spend more time in that library than even Coran and Allura.”

“It’s not the same,” he huffed, dropping down next to her. “Reading in Altean, I mean. And I’m tired of learning my way around Galactic Common.”

“No one asked you to, y’know.”

“No, but we nearly started a civil war the last time we had a diplomatic thing because Shiro couldn’t read all the Galactic Common and Allura and Coran weren’t with him. I figured another one of us should at least be able to tell the difference between a compliment and an insult.”

Pidge snorted at that. “Keith. _You_ can’t tell the difference between a compliment and an insult.”

“Only when it comes from Lance.”

“True.”

It was hard to learn anything about Keith, but after the first few months it was clear that if he wasn’t training, he was reading. And that only became obvious when he made his frustrations known that all the books in the Castle were either in Altean or Galactic Common, and far more of the former than the latter. So Keith being Keith, powered by sheer spite and stubbornness, taught himself to read a whole other language.

Lance had thought it was sad and nerdy. Hunk had been _terrified_.

Pidge had been inclined to agree with Hunk. Because seriously. What the hell, right? She had asked Shiro for an explanation, but he’d only shrugged. As if it was painfully obvious that _of course_ that was what Keith would do.

If she had to describe Keith in a word, it would be _hungry_. It was how he fought, how he flew. And, as it turned out, how he learned. Weeks of griping and grumbling about ridiculous Altean lettering, shuffling awkwardly up to either Allura or Coran to ask a question on his tablet, as if he shouldn’t be asking, as if he ought to be better than that, and eventually he settled down, and instead of glaring daggers at whatever he was reading, he was just… reading.

She figured he was just hungry again now.

“So, what did you want me to try and find for you?”

He reached over her shoulder and tapped at his tablet, revealing a document. “Um. I made a list. If that’s okay.”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?” That was another thing. Keith sometimes apologized for the oddest things. A quick glance aside and she watched him withdraw, and it was subtle but she’d learned most of his tells by now. The way he’d tuck his head down, or fold his arms, or curl his fingers. Make those little huffing noises that always made Shiro smile.

Was he embarrassed? Why would he be? It was just a list of — “Oh. Wow.”

“You don’t have to get them all now,” he muttered, just under his breath. “I can wait.”

“No, that’s not a problem. Really. It’s just… wow.”

Because she always believed you learned a lot about a person from their bookshelves. And Keith was…

Arthur C. Clarke, but only the short stories. Everything written by Iain M. Banks, but only _The Wasp Factory_ by Iain Banks. Japanese mythology. Norse mythology. _Journey To The West_. Tolkien. Books written by or about pilots in the First and Second World Wars. Astronomy, which was not much of a surprise, but the history of Islamic science — “They were the first astronomers,” he said, by way of explanation, when she asked — was unexpected. A long list of popular science books. A selection of Terry Pratchett. Diana Wynn Jones. _The Princess Bride_. Something about dragons and the Napoleonic Wars.

“ _The Malazan Books of the Fallen?_ " 

He shrugged. “I want to reread them.”

“There’s ten of them.”

“I know.”

“It says they amount to over three and a quarter _million_ words.”

“I know.”

“Keith.”

“Look, I like them, okay?” he said, trying and failing to put any venom into his voice. “They’re better than _A Song of Ice and Fire_.”

Pidge clutched at her chest, eyes wide, mock gasping in despair. “Blasphemy! You know that’s blasphemy, right?”

“And I’ve cared since, when?”

“Eh. Point.”

They talked idly about books while they waited for the downloads, and in the midst of it Pidge realized it was the first time Keith sat so comfortably around her. He answered her questions softly, easily, without his usual guardedness. He told her why he loved Shakespeare’s language, or China Mieville’s not-quite-there descriptions. Why after finishing the Harry Potter books he couldn’t bring himself to read them again knowing what he knew about Snape, and he held that grudge still. That he didn’t understand why people insisted on being wrong when the science was _right there_. Like, how could people not want to _know_?

What Keith’s virtual bookshelf told her about him was that he was a dreamer. An escapist. 

She wondered what he needed to escape from, if that was why he lived out in the desert, all alone.

“Hey,” she called after him, when he thanked her and made his way to the door, deciding to go train a little while the downloads kept going. “Anything here you’d recommend me?”

He tilted his head at her, as if he was trying to fit her into something, and that it was important he got it right. With a little nod, he said, “Try _The Quantum Thief_ trilogy. Hannu Rajaniemi.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” There was a shy smile as he thought a little more, before he walked away. “The first time I read it, I saw fireworks.”

 

 

 

Pidge couldn’t sleep.

Not that she slept much at all, but now she was tired, and they’d had an awful, trying time lately. Another freed planet, another alliance made, another day of watching families being reunited. And it ate at her.

She knew she was being selfish. That it wasn’t just her. Hunk and Lance missed their families, too. Maybe even Shiro, though he spoke very little of the family he left behind, the family who still believed him dead. But their families were on Earth, safe as long as the Galra showed little interest in their solar system. Hers were out there, somewhere in the vastness of space and there was nothing she could about it.

She wondered if her mother had been told that she’d gone missing, too. She wondered if her father was still alive: it wasn’t that he was frail in any way, but he wasn’t as young as he used to be and —

She missed Matt. She missed Matt in a way that was visceral and painful. It was as if a part of her was missing, and trying to keep playing the whole game of Schröedinger’s Brother was exhausting, physically and mentally. Sometimes she wished she could just bury him, let him go so that she could just go home. And every single time she thought that Keith’s voice would berate her, remind her she was better than that. That everyone in the universe had a family.

_Do they, Keith? Does that include you?_

That was why she found herself outside Keith’s door, clutching her pillow, knocking gently. She expected him to say something when he opened the door, but all he did was raise an eyebrow, then let it drop again.

“I can’t sleep,” she said.

He stepped to one side to let her pass. “Okay.”

Unquestioning, uncomplicated Keith. Keith, who would never lie to her. Who would tell her what she needed to hear, not what she wanted. Who never overwhelmed her like Hunk or Lance, no matter how well-meaning they were. Who didn’t make her feel quite so small or so young the way Shiro did, because Shiro was, well, Shiro. Keith, who was _nothing_ like Matt yet was the only person she was comfortable seeing as a brother.

She waited for him to crawl back into bed first before following. He had a small bedside light on, and she spotted his tablet abandoned on the edge of the bed. “I interrupt anything?”

“Nah. Just reading.” He collected the tablet, settled into his pillows and clicked through to his recent page.

They stayed that way for a while, Pidge on her side with her back to him, listening to his even breathing and the odd finger-tap on the tablet. He was so quiet, no wonder it drove Lance crazy that he could exist in so much silence.

She figured, the worst he could do was say no. “Will you read to me?”

One beat. Two. He’d tensed immediately at the question, but now she could feel him soften, but cautiously. She waited, for his sake more than her own.

“You. Want _me_ to. _Read_. To _you_.”

She nodded, even though she was sure he couldn’t see it. She curled further into herself when she said, “Matt used to.”

Two beats. Three. Then she felt him rearrange himself on the bed so he was on his side, facing the back of her head. “I’m… I’m not very good at that. I can’t do voices or anything.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she shrugged. “I just… I want to feel like things are normal. For a little bit.”

She wasn’t sure how much time passed, but eventually she felt Keith hoist himself up a little higher, slide one arm underneath her and the other to pull her closer. Then he reached for his tablet, held it so both of them could see the screen. “I’ll read you Red’s favourite. You need to see the pictures, though.”

Pidge looked over her shoulder, a smile tugging at her mouth for the first time in days. “Red has a favourite book?”

She nearly laughed when he looked back at her, very seriously, so stoically. Then with a few taps and a small cough, he began to read.

 _“Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called_ True Stories From Nature _, about the primeval forest…”_

 

 

 

She slept better those nights. They happened from time to time, when she thought too deeply about her family, missed Matt too greatly. Keith never once turned her away, never once said anything at breakfast. Sometimes she’d slip away before he woke up, others she’d find herself in her own bed again. Shiro probably knew something, but Shiro had a knack for knowing things about Keith.

One night, when they were between books and she thought that maybe he’d fallen asleep behind her, he said, almost absently, “I had a sister, once.”

And he spoke as if he was reading, as if it was a thing separate from him. She listened as he told her about his fourth foster home, how they already had a daughter who wasn’t very well, and figured that maybe having a sibling would help. He couldn’t remember for sure, but thought maybe she’d be Pidge’s age now, that they had the same age gap. He kept her company when she couldn’t leave her bed, played games with her, read to her. She was bright and curious. She’d ask him questions about his schoolwork whenever he worked on his assignments next to her bed. She got a telescope, and asked him to show her the stars.

She kept getting sicker, though, he said, and no one really knew why. And the sicker she got, the more his foster mother seemed to want to bar him from spending time with her. And it hadn’t sat right with him. His foster mother was much more vicious with him when they were alone, when his foster father wasn’t home. When he was, she’d complain about Keith, how he was spending too much time with their daughter, neglecting his studies or his chores. The word ‘inappropriate’ got thrown about.

They fought, finally, he and his foster mother. Because something told him that something was very, very wrong. She’d pushed him down the stairs. He’d woken up in hospital, and when he was discharged, it was Sister Isolde from the orphanage who was there to collect him. His things had long been returned. He’d been returned.

By this point, Pidge had him in a loose hug, her forehead resting against his chest. Keith’s voice came from somewhere above her, even and tired and sad.

“What happened to her? Keith, what happened?”

“She died.”

When she gripped at his t-shirt, his only response was to pass his hand up and down her back. Why, she didn’t know. She wasn’t the one who needed comforting.

He said that some weeks later, that foster father came to the orphanage, looking for him. Begged to see him, because he’d found out he was wrong to send him back, wrong to believe his wife. But Keith had refused to see the man who’d let his little sister die. “She’d been poisoning her all that time.”

Pidge’s heart shuddered. “Munchausen by Proxy.”

“That was the ruling, yeah.”

They were silent for a little while, with only the hum of the Castle and the soft swishing of Keith’s hand still passing up and down her back surrounding them. She didn’t know what to say, and she had so much to say. So many things suddenly made sense. So many things they could be dealing with together, as a team. As a family.

“Keith —”

“I wasn’t a very good brother, Pidge,” he said, barely above a whisper, as if this time he really was falling asleep, or in some other in-between state that made him so achingly open and honest. “And I’m not Matt. I don’t know what kind of brother I could ever be. I don’t think — maybe I don’t know how. But I won’t let anything happen to you. Ever. Okay? I… I’m gonna keep you safe, and I’m gonna get you home. Okay?”

She nodded, then quietly: “Okay.” Because she had a feeling he needed to hear it.

He pulled her a little closer, the covers a little higher, and in the dark she dared, even though she didn’t want to be right. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if she was.

“Keith? What was her name?”

The exhale above her rattled and caught, and she didn’t look up to see if there were tears, because she knew he wouldn’t want her to see, and she would absolutely respect that.

“Katie. Her name was Katie.”

 

 

 

It’d been two days.

Pidge hadn’t really wanted to leave her room. She kept thinking about it, thinking that she ought to see the outside of her quarters, eat something other than whatever Hunk left at her door.

Because every time she thought about leaving her room, she wanted to go to Keith’s. Because she wanted things to feel a little bit normal for just a little while. She wanted to curl up on his bed and let him read her the next chapter of _The Last Unicorn_. He was still not doing voices, but he’d change his lilt and cadence. It was almost strange to hear him talk normally, because when he read to her, he said more words in a night than he would an entire week.

Now the silence was deafening.

No one asked about her breakdown. She figured maybe it didn’t warrant an explanation. They were all her brothers now, and she wouldn’t want to lose any one of them. That it was Keith they nearly lost was a hurt only personal to her.

Well. And Shiro, she supposed, from what Hunk had told her.

It still wasn’t worth nearly losing Keith for Shiro to get his head out of his ass, though. Nothing would be worth that. Shiro could go to hell, just this once.

She growled and rolled over on the bed, burying her face into her pillow and screaming.

No. Shiro couldn’t go to hell just this once, no matter how she felt. They were all already in hell.

Rising to her knees, she grabbed her pillow and threw it across the room with a shout.

 _Enough_. This wouldn’t be what Keith wanted. He’d be standing over her, eyes sharp, mouth tight. Telling her there was more than just them. That there were bigger things than them and their sadnesses and problems and issues. There was more to do so they had to _be_ more. No sugar-coating. No gentle big brother pats on the back with platitudes and _“it’ll be okay”_ s.

Because she wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. And Keith had always let her know that was just how it was and it was okay to not be okay. Be angry. Be upset. But put it somewhere useful, somewhere meaningful.

She wanted to cry again but after two days she’d cried everything out.

“What do you want, Keith?” she asked the empty room. “What can I do to make it nearly okay?”

When the answer hit her she felt like the biggest idiot in the known universe.

Pidge threw herself into the shower for the first time since she washed the blood off her hands and knees. She dried and dressed, opened her door at last and went directly to Keith’s door.

She would read to him. Of course. He’d comforted her that way for so many nights and never asked for anything. Now she could return the favour. She just needed his tablet. She knew where it would be. Just by the bed.

Keith’s door was unlocked; she walked straight in. And stopped.

“Shiro?”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keith is reading her The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.


	3. Hunk

It took two days before Hunk could shower normally, without trying to scrub his skin off, without still seeing the blood on his hands. He would easily count that experience as the worst he’d ever had. As a Paladin. As a person. He hoped he’d never have to go through something like that again. He’d gone through it once with Lance already, but with Lance it had been… cleaner. Simpler. Nothing quite so bloody or so violent.

Lance never screamed. That, he took as a blessing.

He didn’t like the atmosphere in the Castle at the moment. It was too quiet, too tense, too… almost sad. Pidge still hadn’t wanted to come out of her room. Allura and Coran had been either finding a safe, quiet part of the galaxy to hole up in while Keith recovers, or checking on Keith himself. Shiro…

He could hear Shiro’s nightmares whenever he passed by his door.

So he knew: if Shiro wasn’t screaming himself awake, he was in the med bay, waiting by the cryopod.

Hunk hadn’t been able to bring himself to talk to Shiro yet. He’d been there, when everything was raw. He’d seen the exact moment Shiro remembered. And he couldn’t even begin to fathom how he was feeling right now. What he’d witnessed was so intimate that if it hadn’t been life or death, he would have left the room.

It was — or what would be — early morning in the castle when he wandered into the living space on his way to the kitchen. Lance was in the sunken seated area, hunched over and staring at nothing in particular.

“Hey. You okay, bro?”

Lance practically jumped in his seat, scrambling to turn around and not fall off at the same time. “Hunk! Dude, you scared me.”

“Sorry, man.” Hunk took a moment, and slowly little details came forward. The dark circles under Lance’s eyes, red-rimmed as if he’d either been crying or just not sleeping. Mussed hair. Stress lines where there weren’t any before. “You doing all right? You don’t look like you’ve had much sleep.”

Deep down, Hunk knew what would come next. The smile, the brush off. He could almost count down to it.

“Me? Nah, nah, I’m good, mostly,” Lance replied, waving him off. “I mean, honestly, though, how can anyone really sleep after that, right?”

“Lance…”

The Blue Paladin threw himself off the sofa and walked up the seating area. “No, really. I —” Hunk watched him take a breath, before sagging visibly under the weight of… everything. “Look. You. You were… amazing. You were great. I don’t think — I don’t think I could have done what you did. I know I bitched when Shiro said that you and Keith should go and not me, but if I’d been with Keith…”

“Lance, you’d have done the same. I know you,” he said, putting a huge hand on his best friend’s shoulder. “No way you’d let Keith down.”

That was apparently the wrong thing to say.

“No, you don’t know that!” Lance all but yelled, backing away from his touch. “I… You’re the nervous one! You get _scared!_ But you didn’t! You just… carried him and took care of him and he’s alive because you did that!”

“Lance, wait, stop —”

“If I’d got my way and it was me who went in with him, _he’d be dead!_ ” Lance ran a hand through his hair, and Hunk realized that he must have done that a thousand times that day. “God, Hunk, he’s _still_ screaming in my head and you were _in there with him_ and I can’t —”

Hunk didn’t let him get another word in: he rushed forward and wrapped him in a bear hug, and held him as hard as he could. He felt him struggle a little, but also felt the trembling, so he held on, and on, and on.

He waited until Lance’s breaths evened out, until his frame softened and his head sat heavy against his shoulder. And even then, he held on.

“He would’ve died, Hunk,” Lance said, finally, low and shaky. “If it’d been me, he would’ve died. There is no way I could’ve… and Pidge was freaking _out_ and I barely got a handle on _that_ and _fuck me,_ fuck my _life_ and my stupid…”

“Lance. Buddy.”

“Y-yeah?”

Hunk sighed, because this was hard. Everything was hard. They’d been through a lot and still nothing could come close to these few days. But there wasn’t much else for it. “I’m telling you, you would have done the same. You’re brave, you have heart, and you’d have dug deep for him. I’m not friends with you for nothing, y’know.”

There was a snort. “I thought it was for my good looks?”

“Nah. Can’t always count on a pretty face to have my back.”

“Pfft. Yeah. Look at where pretty faces get me.” He felt Lance pull away then, and pretended to not see the way he brought a sleeve to his eyes. “Thank, man. I… I’m sorry I kinda went off on one.”

Hunk shrugged. “No problem. I mean, we’re all we’ve got in this Castle, right? Gotta prop each other up.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Lance rubbed the back of his head, and then made his way to the doors. “I’m gonna… maybe go for a swim? Something. Settle a little.”

“You do that,” he returned with a thumbs up. “I’m gonna make some bread.”

 

 

 

Hunk stared at the stuff on the counter, and looked again at the Altean instructions. They weren’t helping.

He was pretty sure one bag was flour, apart from the fact it was pink. He’d mixed it with water and it made the right sort of paste and the other night he even managed a decent roux to make a sauce for dinner. He knew that the mineral powder he had was salt, because he’d a) licked it, b) checked its chemical composition, and c) ground it himself after he was sure.

And as far as he and Pidge knew from the tests they ran, the… goop… in the jar was the same sort of yeast in a sourdough starter. Even if that was blue and looked like it was looking back at him.

So. Flour, salt, yeast, water. Bread.

Right?

“Ugh. I really should have paid attention when Mom was making bread,” Hunk grumbled. “That’s what I get for concentrating on the cakes and the _cordon bleu_ stuff. Sure Hunk, make a great sabayon, but a loaf of bread is a mystery?”

“What _is_ a sabayon?”

Hunk wasn’t proud of the noise he made just then, when he nearly leapt onto the kitchen counter and his tablet went slinging into the air. But at least he didn’t knock anything over, didn’t get flour everywhere, and the goop didn’t escape, and his tablet didn’t shatter on the floor because Keith caught it.

“Oh my _god_ , Keith! Do NOT. Ninja me like that.”

“Sorry,” he shrugged. He looked tired and freshly-showered: another morning on the training deck, then. “Just came in for some water. What’re you doing?” He passed Hunk his tablet back and fetched a glass from the cupboard.

“Well, I think I have the right stuff to make bread, and thought I oughta try. I mean, gotta have bread, right? Something to at least spread the goo on?”

Keith leaned against the cabinets, downing his glass and immediately filling it again. “If it helps the flavour of the goo any, then yeah.”

“Oh most definitely. But these instructions are… hey, hang on. You can read Altean, right?”

He titled his head, in that way that was almost adorable if it wasn’t… _Keith_. “Uh, yeah? But you don’t need to read Altean to make bread?”

“I don’t?”

A small, uncharacteristic smile appeared then, which was alarmingly disarming. Hunk blinked a couple of times, but before he could say anything further Keith had stepped around next to him and pulled his oversized sweater off.

That was something they all found oddly cute: the replicator could make any clothing they needed, but Keith always favoured sweaters at least two sizes too big for him.They were big enough that Pidge once stole one and used it as a sleeping bag. Keith just got another one made. The idea that Keith was a potential cuddler kept Lance awake at night, apparently, for the sheer wrongness of it.

“Whoa, whoa, dude!” Hunk waved his arms about, pointing. “If you’re gonna help, take those gloves off. I don’t know where they’ve been!”

Keith stared for two seconds. “They’ve… been on my hands?”

“Oh, ha ha.” Hunk wasn’t all that surprised when Keith gave a wry grin before carefully taking his gloves off. “So you’re not always _that_ oblivious, are you?”

Another shrug, a shoulder roll. “Sometimes… I still miss _some_ cues? But it’s funny to wind Lance up.”

“Hah! Figures —”

Hunk was going to say something else, but the gloves got tucked away into a back pocket, and he was distracted by a glint of silver from Keith’s right hand, before his left passed over it, and the glint was gone into another pocket.

This time, Keith was clearly oblivious.

The Red Paladin was already measuring out the flour and sniffing at the yeast goo. “The older kids usually got kitchen jobs, but I kept weird sleep and study hours, so the sisters taught me how to make bread for the home. I’d study or whatever, start the dough, then sleep for four hours, wake up, do the second prove, sleep another two or so, study, then bake. Ready for breakfast.”

Hunk watched Keith work, mixing the dry ingredients — he made a face at the blue goop, but said nothing — and wetting them, working it into a workable mass. He asked for a knife, cut the mass in two, and gave Hunk half. He showed him how to work it, kneading until it was stretchy, enough to make a thin window pane they could almost see through.

“You do actually know what you’re doing,” Hunk said, humming in appreciation.

“I made a hell of a lot of bread in my time,” Keith said, and his tone unsettled Hunk. He sounded tired, and not just from his recent training session. “It was just cheaper to make ourselves. The best bread we could get on our budget was glorified cardboard. It was better this way.”

Hunk grinned at that. “Sure it is! Homemade bread is always best! My mom made the best rolls. And this sunflower and honey bread that’s to die for. There was always bread in our house. It’s a family thing, y’know? You break bread with your family.”

“Yeah. We used to do that…”

He didn’t ask what he meant by ‘ _we_ ’. He knew he couldn’t mean the home, the orphanage: Keith had once made it clear he'd been glad to leave. ‘ _We_ ’ was somewhere else. Some _one_ else. But Keith had said more about his past than he ever did before, and Hunk didn’t want to spoil it for either of them.

They put their lumps of dough into tins, covered them, set them aside. Keith told him to wait for them to double in size, which, given it wasn’t regular flour or yeast, could be anything between two to eight hours. “Just check anyway. I’m gonna take a nap.”

It surprised Hunk not at all when exactly four hours later, Keith came back. “Your body clock remembers the bread, Keith.”

He stretched, cat-like, and grumbled. “Did they rise?”

They’d easily doubled. They knocked the dough back, made it elastic and smooth. Set them back in their tins, covered them. The next four hours were spent quietly, Hunk tinkering with something Pidge brought in for repair — _“You call my gloves unsanitary and you’re grease-monkeying in the kitchen?”_ — and Keith reading. Baking smells filled the kitchen not long after, and soon the pair were pulling out two slightly lopsided but perfectly serviceable loaves of bread.

“How do you know?”

Keith picked one up and turned it over, knocked on it with his knuckles. There was a pleasant hollow sound. He smiled. “That’s how.”

When Hunk cut the first slice, off the end, he did what would always be done: he broke the piece in two, and offered it to Keith. He did that head tilt again, blinking owlishly at the proffered piece of bread.

“You break bread with your family, right?”

Keith took the bread, finally, with a smile. “Yeah. Right.” Then: “Um. It’s… _purple?_ ”

“Ya think?” Hunk took a closer look. “Looks more like a kind of mauve to me. You think it’s mauve, or maybe lilac?”

“It’ll clash horribly with the green goo.”

Hunk nearly choked on his bread, laughing, knowing Lance would _never_ believe what Keith had just said.

He never saw that glint of silver again.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Mainlined S2 yesterday. I'm broken. 
> 
> What an amazing series. It's obviously shaken up some of the details in this fic, but I'm going to roll with it: that's what AUs are for, after all. 
> 
> This was a hard chapter to write, so thank you for sticking around for it!


	4. Allura and Coran

It didn’t add up.

Well. He _could_ make it add up. Easily. But it meant changing variables. Quite necessary variables. Variables that would rewrite quite a few things.

“Coran?”

Coran lifted his gaze from the screen and turned to face the Princess. “Ah. Evening, my dear Princess. Come to check on our boy, have you?”

Allura frowned, wishing she could keep the same jovial positivity that Coran was somehow maintaining. He hadn’t faltered once, not even when he was making his third attempt at restarting Keith’s heart. He was the one who set Keith into the pod, who mopped the blood off the floor, who collected pieces of bloody Paladin armour and taken them to be cleaned and repaired. She wondered how he did it, a lot of the time.

“Coran, please don’t think less of me if I ask this,” she began, glancing briefly at the cryopod. “Because you know the Paladins mean a great deal to me… They’re my family, and to think that —”

“You don’t think Keith should have survived.”

Her breath jammed in her throat, and she found herself needing to swallow around it. She hadn’t slept since she wormholed them to a safe location far enough away from the site of their last attack, kept awake by screams and blood and Galra cruelty. She knew all too well what they were capable of, having seen firsthand what they did to her people, her home, and now the damage visited upon her Paladins. It seemed never-ending.

“N-No,” she admitted. “I thought it was a miracle you were able to bring him back. And if Hunk and Shiro hadn’t worked so quickly…” She smiled then, weak but proud. “I suppose humans are more resilient than we realize.”

Coran sighed. It was time to tell her.

“I ran some tests on that neurotoxin, managed to extract a sample from the weapon before we disposed of it. It’s… incredibly potent, Allura. More so than any poison I’ve come across.”

Allura couldn’t help but shrug. “Does that matter anymore? Keith is safe now. We just need to wait for the pod to —”

“It should have killed him, Allura.”

“Coran!” His tone was so cold it shocked her, like a bucket of ice water dumped over her head. “It doesn’t matter!”

“It might, if he is injured this gravely again,” Coran said, beckoning her to his screen. She followed, and narrowed her eyes at what she saw. “The composition of the neurotoxin is quite specific, and considering it was contained in a weapon that appears to be carried openly by at least some of the Galra, precautions had to be taken.”

She read the screen again, shaking her head. “But this can’t be…”

“It’s the only reason he’s still alive. He did not absorb the neurotoxin as quickly as he should have done. Had he not been —”

“They are _monsters_ , Coran!”

And there it was.

Keith’s name — written in Altean — no longer registered. All that mattered was the descent of the Galra ships into Altean airspace ten thousand years ago, the elimination of her city, her home, her people. _Her father._ The destruction wrought across the universe, countless peoples enslaved, families torn apart. Every ache and pain visited upon the residents of her Castle. And Shiro! Their own Paladin, still bearing the scars and ill-effects of being in Galra hands.

But then… Shiro.

_“Come on, baby.”_

_“I promise. It’ll be okay. You’re strong. You can do this.”_

_“God, baby, I’m so sorry.”_

Coran’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she snapped to, loosening her clenched fists. “Be that as it may, Princess, he is with us now. And…” He sighed, deeper this time, sadder. Allura had never seen him so disheartened, not even when they first woke up to their new reality. “No monster deserves this.”

He handed her a tablet, with a different set of information on Keith’s injuries, a set that Coran was keeping to himself. She read it, once, twice, absorbing and then refusing to accept. Her hand flew to her mouth and tears stung her eyes. Suddenly his name registered again, and shame crept up her spine. “Oh. Oh, Coran, no…”

Coran only nodded, gently taking his tablet back from her hand. “He’ll recover, I’m sure. And for a while, I assumed that it was why his brain activity has been so quiet, near non-existent, really. It must have been terrible. It’s a wonder he got off that ship at all. That would have been when he caught that abysmal blade.”

Allura was only half-listening, now, as she walked up to the cryopod. There had been little change. Unlike previous instances, Keith’s condition had been too dire to waste time stripping him of his black bodysuit, so he was still dressed in the remnants of it. The bruise on his face was nearly gone, and the faded bandages showed that at least the wounds on his leg and abdomen were nearly healed, the scars making neat lines on his skin. His broken wrist had been reset, and the scans showed that the bone has re-fused well.

The other scar on his side, still yet forming, she did not let her eyes linger upon for too long. And those were only the external ones.

“Shiro. How do we tell _Shiro?_ ” she whispered, almost to herself, expecting no answer.

Coran came up beside her, still bearing the tablet tucked under his arm. Together they watched the graphs and numbers on the screen on the pod: a fragile heartbeat, only barely stronger than when they resuscitated him; a shallow but regular intake of oxygen. Almost no brain activity. He seemed suddenly so remarkably small, delicate: by Coran’s affectionate nicknaming scale, he would be Number Four. The thought of him under the care of someone like Shiro, someone so strong and powerful, was endearing. It made her wonder about their relationship, made her sad thinking about Shiro only just remembering, about Keith harbouring that secret alone for so long.

She reached her hand out to touch the pod, but the Red Lion growled, long and low in her consciousness — a warning — and she drew her hand back. Her eyes grew wide.

Red was close. Red was _in this room_. Red was _not_ in the hangar.

“Coran, what are we using to measure his brain activity?”

“Same as we did for Lance and Shiro the times they were in there. Why do you ask?”

But both had dreamed. She knew that. They told her as much. And dreams would show up as activity. Shiro’s, she remembered, had such violent spikes.

Was Keith not dreaming at all? Was he even _there?_

“Lance and Shiro are both _human_.”

Coran slowly turned to face her, eyebrows steadily climbing to his hairline as her implication dawned on him. “Goodness. You’re right! Hang a tick!” He ran back to the main console, fingers flying across the keys and screens, dozens of charts, maps, graphs blipping in and out. Eventually it all came to rest on one, where a golden line flickered weakly under the x-axis.

Alongside that, a red line the Alteans had long coded to signify the Red Lion.

“How is that possible?” Coran flailed, looking between the screens and the pod. “Does this mean the Red Lion is non-operational? But we can’t have that!”

Allura shook her head. She thought about what Shiro had said, about the neurotoxin. How victims had lost their minds with pain before the blade killed them. During the mind-meld exercises, Keith’s walls were almost the strongest, impenetrable unless he allowed it. She never let on, but she’d tried, once or twice, to poke in, and failed each time. She assumed it was just how he was: stubborn, resilient, focused.

“She’s in there with him,” she said, awed at the truth that was dawning upon her. “She went with him to protect him.”

Those walls had come crashing down. They should have taken Keith with them, buried him, _killed him_. Were that true, Red wouldn’t be with him.

So he’d escaped. Somehow, he’d —

“Sanctuary. He… enacted Sanctuary.”

“Princess, you know that’s impossible. That would mean… _oh_. Oh my.”

“Coran,” she began, chewing her lower lip, refusing to let the temptation to smile overtake her. Hysterically unable to truly process her feelings from this last hour, from concern to fury to shame to sadness. And now… “How old is Keith?”

Coran stroked his moustache as he tapped at the screen again. “I suppose it’s a fair question now, but that doesn’t seem to have changed. Twenty Earth years.”

Her smile grew. “Twenty Earth years. So recent…”

“Allura? What are you thinking?”

So much. She was thinking of _so much_. The variables had changed. One set told her how he physically survived and made her stomach churn, the other…

He’d known where the Blue Lion was. The proximity probably helped, but somehow he’d known she was there. He never strayed from the area. He’d found her even though she eventually chose Lance.

The Blue Lion had called to him.

And now he’d done something she’d only heard stories about. Never in her wildest dreams…

“I’m thinking… that somewhere out there, right now, there’s _hope_.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was such an awkward chapter with there being two points of view. But hey, it's not high art, so whatever works, right? :)
> 
> Thank you so much for all the comments and kudos for this fic. I know I don't reply to everyone, but please know that every time I see a new one, my day is ultimately made. Thank you so very much. And remember that I'm happy to chat or answer any of your questions (without spoiling you, of course!).
> 
> Next time: Lance fans, you're in for a treat. ;)


	5. Lance

Shiro was on the bridge with Coran and Allura. Hunk was in Yellow’s hangar, doing repairs . Pidge, in her workshop. Keith was probably on the training deck. Again.

Good. That meant the pool was all his.

And god, did he need it. What a shitshow of a morning. Already in a bad mood because he’d run out of his face mask last night and no one cared when he insisted that his skin felt like rhino hide — cue explanation to the Alteans what a rhino was, and shamefully explaining why they were hunted to near-extinction — and then he’d shocked himself six times in the maze and he knew that was all on him because Shiro had been the one directing him. Gladiator work went okay, but then Allura insisted on a mind-meld exercise and that was more than enough for his bad temper.

Stupid Keith.

He bonded with Pidge and Hunk so easily, and then with some gentle prodding, Shiro let him in and let him settle a tentative bond there. But oh no, not Keith. Keith kept his walls up and up and he was positive the more he poked and prodded and jabbed and pounded his fists the more Keith held them up. Shiro had told him, he couldn’t do that with Keith: he had to be patient and let him make the decision. “You know, exactly like how Red refused to let Keith in just because he demanded she do so. You thought that was pretty funny then, didn’t you?” he’d said with a sly smile.

Pfft. Right. Because he was so completely _Keith_ in this scenario and Keith was a _magic robot space lion_. Whatever.

His mood immediately improved upon being hit with the sweet humid air of the swimming pool, and with zero hesitation he dumped his towel, threw off his jacket and t-shirt and made a perfect dive into the water, immediately darting with speed to the far end of the pool. He liked to start with a long underwater swim, just to challenge himself, get his heart pumping. He knew he could do a length and a half no problem without ever coming up for air.

He cut through the water easily, enjoying the way it slid over his skin. Here he was happy, completely in his element. Maybe it was no accident that Blue had chosen him, that he was the Guardian Spirit of the Water. Here he wasn’t clumsy, slow, inattentive.

Which was why he spotted the curled up figure in the corner of the pool. Underwater.

Black hair waving silently, like seaweed. Red swim shorts.

What the hell. Keith?!

Kicking out, Lance darted towards the fetal-curled figure, briefly marveling at the strength required to keep that body so stably underwater, and without thinking, grabbed Keith’s shoulder.

Three things happened at once: Keith’s eyes blew open, he drew back, and he _inhaled_.

Oops.

Thinking again, Lance reached out, curled himself behind the other Paladin, securing a long arm around his chest and kicked upwards to the surface. Keith weighed barely anything in the water, only weighed a little more out of it. Lance could never work out how something so lithe could hit so damned hard. It was annoying and unfair.

They broke the surface, Keith hacking out water in a way that sounded painful. Lance dragged him to the pool’s edge, hefting himself out easily, then bent down. “Here, cross your arms, left in left, right in right, that’s it.” Grasping his hands tight, Lance lifted Keith out until he could get him to sit on the edge. He kept one hand on his shoulder, the other pressing and massaging deep into his back. “That’s it, cough it up.”

Keith shot him a glare. “I wouldn’t be coughing up _anything_ —” he bent double again, lungs punishing him for the water intake, “— if you hadn’t scared the shit out of me.”

“Ha, so you admit I scared you!”

Sometimes, Lance wished he’d thought a little more before opening his mouth. If Keith wasn’t still coughing up his insides he was pretty sure he’d be dead. And really, he wouldn’t blame him. Instead of apologizing he ran to the other side of the pool, grabbed his jacket and towel and made his way back. He was just grateful he didn’t slip in his run and kill himself. Within moments he had Keith wrapped in his towel and draped his jacket over him for good measure, rubbing steady passes up and down his back.

“Better?”

Wheezing a little now, Keith gave a single nod. “Yeah. Think so.”

“Okay, good. So,” Lance said, sitting down next to him, dropping his feet into the water. “What the _hell_ were you _doing?!_ ”

Maybe yelling wasn’t the best idea: Keith jumped enough that he could have slipped back into the pool and drowned under the weight of the towel and jacket around him. But he couldn’t help himself. “What were you — I don’t even — were you _trying_ to drown?!”

Blinking. The hotheaded idiot was _blinking_ at him like he didn’t understand. What in actual hell.

“How long were you even down there for? I came in for a nice calming swim and I don’t even know how long it took me to get my groove on in here and then you’re fucking _underwater_ like you think you’re a _mermaid_ and lifeguard training prepped me for _a lot_ of things but not _that!_ ”

So much for calming. He braced himself for another bout of bickering, because that was just what this day warranted. He didn’t entirely expect Keith to look away and say, very softly, “Sorry.”

“Wait, what?”

Lance watched Keith bob a shoulder in a sort of half shrug, still looking away. “I just… wanted some quiet. It’s quiet underwater, so I was there. I didn’t think anyone would find me here. So, you know. Sorry for freaking you out.”

A moment went by before Lance said, “I thought you’d be on the training deck.”

The other shoulder went up, giving the other half of the first shrug. “Wasn’t helping.”

“What’s wrong with your room?”

“Shiro would check on me.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Sometimes I don’t wanna talk,” he said, and Lance realized that he could have said it much more sharply, with far more venom, because right now he was making him talk when he just said he didn’t want to. As far as he knew, Keith wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want to. And he wasn’t sniping, which would be the usual reaction to this sort of situation.

“Uh, dunno how to break it to you, but you’re kinda talking now,” Lance ventured. Unless he meant he didn’t want to talk to _Shiro_ , which would be weird. They were practically each other’s shadow. And all of them looked up to Shiro, so wanting to avoid him didn’t sit right, especially coming from Keith. The guy only really seemed to open up around the Black Paladin; that he wanted to stay closed off, on purpose…

A different set of instincts kicked in then. Looking at Keith now, he wasn’t just distant: he looked _lost_. Keith, who had that infuriating, almost regal confidence, who seemed utterly unyielding, looked small and brittle. And that was just _wrong_.

“Okay,” Lance began, gesturing at the door. “See that door? Asshole Lance just walked out that door. You’re stuck with Big Brother Lance now.”

Keith turned to look at him with wide eyes. And that little head tilt. What was with that head tilt? Keith should never, ever be allowed to look like a confused puppy. No. That just ran against everything that made sense in the world. Puppies didn’t handle sharp objects with intent of causing bodily harm. Lance had dealt with all sorts of weirdness by now, but Confused Puppy Keith remained beyond his remit.

“Seriously. One-time offer.”

They were both just kicking their feet in the water now, making small splashes and echoing ripples, when finally, finally, Keith said, “Why is there even an Asshole Lance?”

Lance snorted, not expecting that to be the question, but hey, talking was talking. “Ha. That. Well —” And he stalled. He had to phrase this right or Keith would either hit him or run off and he’d never know. He knew that Keith had always been alone. Hell, he remembered seeing Keith at the Garrison alone, in the library, in the mess hall, running laps. Shiro, he always guessed, and it was still a guess, still based on rumours, was the nearest thing to family Keith had.

So instead of answering, he reached over to one of the pockets of his jacket that still sat around Keith’s shoulders, and pulled out a wallet, and from that, a small holopic. He tapped it, and presented it to Keith. “Big family,” he said, by way of explanation. He watched the Red Paladin take the holopic carefully into his hand, as if it might break, as if he understood just how precious it was, and watched him blink at the image of all those people on it. “So. In order: biggest sister Natalia, the twins Alonso and Ariana, then that’s where I come in, and then there’s Emilia, Matías, and little baby Ana Sofía. Oh and that one there is Alonso’s husband, Sebastián. And the lone white dude with blonde hair and appley cheeks is Ariana’s fiancé, Daniel. They were gonna get married this summer.” He pointed each one out, smiling fondly. “That’s my dad, Esteban, and my mom, Catalina, and my mom’s twin brother, Javier. He lives with us because apparently our house wasn’t enough of a zoo without him.”

He wondered what Keith was thinking, what he was looking at, when his eyes didn’t shift from the image. Lance was proud of his beautiful family, his beautiful, loud, ridiculous family. Why else would he miss them so much? He missed their noise, their language, their food, their chaos. Sometimes the longing ran so deep he didn’t know why he hadn’t already just loaded up into Blue and gone home. But the longing he saw in Keith was different. It was as if he understood, maybe even liked what he saw, but he didn’t know what to do with it. Lance supposed there might not have been anyone to tell him.

“That… still doesn’t explain why there’s an Asshole Lance.”

Lance also supposed he would never be able to predict the next thing to come out of Keith’s mouth.

“Well, we’re a big family. With big personalities. Loud. Obnoxious. Sometimes, the only way to get a word in is to be louder and more obnoxious than everyone else in the room, y’know? And you get used to that. Sisters screaming about borrowed make-up, brothers yelling at the TV, Mama trying to get everyone to shut up, Papa singing to the radio, and I’m just like, can someone please tell me _where the fuck my swim bag is_ because I’m late for practice. And I get a clip round the ear from Uncle Javi for swearing.” He shrugged at Keith’s incredulous expression. “It’s that sorta house.”

 _That_ got a tiny smile out of him. That felt pretty good.

“But you fit in, though, didn’t you.”

Not a question, not quite a statement, either. “Well, yeah. I’m their kid, nephew, brother. I kinda didn’t have a choice. Fit in so hard I had to claw my way out to get seen. We all did. Just how it was with that many of us, I guess.”

Keith nodded, then looked back at the holopic with an intensity that made Lance wonder if he was trying to memorize their names. Eventually he tapped it off, and moved to hand it back.

And that was when Lance saw it.

“Dude, what happened to your hand?” he squealed, snatching the holopic away and grabbing Keith’s hand. The back of it was scarred, just below the knuckles, skin folded over skin. “Is that some kind of burn? What did you do?”

In the seconds between, Lance once again wished he would think before he acted, because he was handling _Keith_. Keith didn’t do hugs, kept himself in a tight coil within a personal space that was an impenetrable fortress. And he’d just yanked his hand nearly out of its socket.

Once again, Keith did something unexpected.

“I don’t know. I’ve always had them,” he said, plain and simple, showing his other hand, with nearly identical scarring. They didn’t seem to really bother him, not their origin or their appearance.

Shit. Shiro was right. He couldn’t just barge into Keith’s head. He had to wait. And now that he was there, he wasn’t entirely sure what to do.

“Is that why you wear the gloves?” Lance asked, very carefully. “Why would you hide them? S’not like we care you have them, right?”

“The other kids at the orphanage did.”

“Oh.”

Lance let his hand go, and they settled in a temporary silence. He sort of knew about the orphanage thing, from back at the Garrison when Keith arrived as a clear — yet still only rumoured — problem child because of it, despite his academic scores. Arrogant, friendless, cold. That was the reputation that went around, that was what stuck, and that was what Lance had bought, hook, line, and sinker. And then, all he did was surpass everyone in flight class and got talked up to being the youngest cadet to gain rank since one Takashi Shirogane. That was enough to make Lance hate him. At least, he thought he did.

“Sister Isolde gave me my first pair,” Keith said, suddenly and softly. “Out of storage. Cut the fingers off so I could still write and work. Then every time I grew a little more, she’d get me another pair. When I started learning how to fight, I wore compression gloves. They help me when I’m working on engines and stuff as well so… yeah. I guess I’ve always worn them. Never really gave them much thought.”

“Huh,” was all he could say. He let things click quietly in his head until: “Sister. You were in one of those church orphanages.”

“Yeah.”

“Nuns everywhere.”

“That’s the one.”

“Fire and brimstone bible study?”

“Yup.”

“And the scars on your hands are like… oh.”

“Exactly.”

“Huh.” Lance made a face at that. Keith was way too rebellious a character, far too independent to rely on any god, let alone a strict Christian idea of one. “You’d think they’d be nicer to you about it then.”

Keith let out a low chuckle, shaking his head. “No way. Not looking like I do. Not with…the way I was.” Lance opened his mouth to ask the question, but he went on to say, “The nuns had a deep mistrust of strangely-coloured eyes.”

“Except the one you mentioned.”

He nodded. “Except her.”

“She must be pretty special.”

“She was.”

“Oh,” Lance said. He was getting good at that. ‘Oh’ and ‘huh’ were really working out for him. “I’m sorry.”

Keith shrugged, but he smiled. “Don’t be. She was proud. She was ready. She’s probably still yelling at God right now.”

“Heh. Cool.”

There was another companionable silence. Usually it bothered Lance that Keith was so quiet whenever they were the only two people in a room. Usually, that was why he picked fights with him. Not only was he easy to bait — a brother knew how to bait, after all — it at least reminded him of bickering with his brothers and sisters. But this, though: this was nice. Just the sounds of the water running in the exchange, the occasional splash of their feet.

But enough was enough.

“Sooo. What did they call you then? Spawn of Satan? The Cursed One? He Who Shall Not Be Named?”

“Demon Child,” Keith answered, sounding almost pleased with himself. “I made sure I earned it.”

“You don’t seem like the pranking type.”

“Nah. I’d just… turn up when they don’t expect me to. Catch me listening to them when they think no one is. Walk soundlessly past their doors. Really freaked them out.”

Lance laughed, and he didn’t even bother to examine that he was laughing _with_ Keith. “My brother Alonso would _love_ you. That’s so his style.”

“The twin, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So why are you called Lance?”

That earned another laugh. Oh yes. This story. How the twins Ariana and Alonso had been so excited to have a new baby brother. How everyone said he looked exactly like Alonso when he was a baby. How Alonso took that idea and ran with it and never called him anything other than ‘Little Alonso’, but always said it in such a way it came out as ‘Li Lanza’. Then the rest of the family got into the act. “So, you know. Lanza. Lance. I kept it. My name’s actually Leandro Alejandro Espinosa.”

Keith tilted his head back, looking up at the tiled ceiling, like he was tasting the name in his head, matching it with all the other names of the Espinosa family. Then — and Lance couldn’t work out how he never noticed how many expressions Keith actually had within a thirty-second time span — he looked thoughtful, weighing up his options as to how to respond to something like that.

Keith had said a lot of things that afternoon that he did not expect. What he said next would keep him awake at night.

“Bet you thought Lady Gaga was talking about you, huh.”

Lance’s jaw fell with an almost audible pop. Then he sputtered, spat, babbled. “You… I— you’re not — but you… _fucking son of a_ —”

That was the exact moment, before Lance made the decision to try and strangle the Red Paladin, that Keith slipped out of the towel and jacket and right back into the pool, swimming away to the other end.

“No! No! Come back here, you _jackass!_ ” Lance yelled, his voice bouncing off the gleaming polished walls. “How dare you! That’s it! Big Brother time is _over!_ Asshole Lance is back and I’m going to _drown you!_ ”

 

 

 

Lance took another deep breath, and dropped back below the surface of the pool. Curled up into a ball, closed his eyes, willed his body to sink down. He waited for his lungs to burn, waited for the roaring in his ears.

It was no use.

No matter how many breaths he took, no matter how long he stayed underwater, he could not drown out what had been in his head since Keith nearly died. He could not drown out the unvoiced screams of pain and terror, echoing around a darkened Galra warship.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry for how long this chapter took to write. Lance needed to sound right to me, and that took some time. He's fun, but such a sodding bastard. I hope this chapter is worth the wait. 
> 
> In case you're wondering, what Lance is referring to regarding the scars on Keith's hands is [stigmata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmata).
> 
> But, as I've described, they're nothing as severe as the link suggests. Nuns can be a rather superstitious lot sometimes.
> 
> In the meantime every single one of your comments has meant the world to me. Thank you for enjoying the world I'm building and the story I'm trying to tell, and thank you for your curiosity, love and support!
> 
> You can now also find me on Twitter as [lionescence](https://twitter.com/lionescence). Come say hi!
> 
> Next time, we'll be back fully in the present, fully into the plot, and... Shiro.


	6. Shiro

Shiro looked up from where he sat on the floor in front of the cryopod, hugging his knees tight to his chest. As the hours passed, more and more things came into sharper and sharper focus. More things made sense.

Like why he’d felt more than relief when he’d woken up in that little shack and seen those violet eyes, that fretful brow. Why that touch — _“Good to have you back”_ — lit up his spine. Why he could never _not_ touch back: shoulder pats, a cuff across the back. The ridiculous urge to scrub a hand through his hair, knowing — remembering? — that it would make him giggle.

Giggle. He knew Keith could _giggle_.

He’d always hoped that if any of his missing memories were to return, they’d be useful ones. How he remembered to defeat that RoBeast, or the timings of the guard rotations on board that Galra vessel he snuck into with the Princess. He’d hoped for more information to help them in their cause, anything to give them a break. Where they took the other prisoners, where they were getting all their supplies and materials from, who the Druids were, what they could do, what they _did to him._

He’d always hoped that if any of those things came back to light, he would not hesitate to put that information to action. He’d let Coran and Pidge run what he knew through the Castle’s databases to see if they could use any of it. It would have been immediate. That information was for Team Voltron.

But these. These memories he would guard jealously. These were _his_. And that they were stolen from him hurt him more than any wound, angered him in a way that almost frightened him. He’d never truly been angry at the Galra before: in his mind, what happened on Kerberos was sheer bad luck, and everything that happened after… well. Led him here, in the end. Home, briefly, then here, in an intergalactic war beside a newfound family. He’d never quite put a feeling to it, other than relief, perhaps, and a sense of duty.

Now, though. Now, he was angry. The Galra had stolen him from his home, from his family, from Keith. Stolen his dignity, his humanity. And then, somehow, through trauma or god-only-knew-what, stolen his memories. Stolen Keith from him. Ripped away his one true reason for coming home from Kerberos successfully, the one thing that might have kept him alive when all he wanted to do was die, either in his cell or in the arena.

They took him away from Keith, and then Keith away from him. They made him leave Keith alone, for much longer than he intended, and then kept Keith alone despite standing right next to him because he hadn’t remembered.

Oh, did he remember.

He knew how Keith liked his coffee, his tea, his eggs (black, milk with one sugar, over easy). He knew he was partially ambidextrous, would have been more so had the nuns not beaten it out of him (he’d been working on getting it back). He knew that Keith could laugh so hard he practically screamed, doubled over and nearly in tears, and he only needed to say a word and he’d set him off all over again. He knew he read voraciously, and got fantastically grumpy if he tried to talk to him while he was nose-deep in a book — he’d dodged many a book to his head that way.

He remembered the way they’d danced in the dusty living room of the shack, when they decided that it would be theirs, their space, their hideaway. Where he wasn’t the Golden Boy and Keith wasn’t the Problem Child. Where they could be selfish for themselves and selfless for each other. He remembered that Keith would hum, or sing quietly when he thought no one was listening, while he worked on the hoverbike, or made breakfast in nothing but his boxer briefs and an oversized sweatshirt, hair a pile of discordant fluff and cheeks still rosy from sleep.

_“Mmm. You smell nice.”_

_“I’m sure you’re smelling the pancakes, Takashi.”_

_“Is this my sweatshirt?”_

_“Here’s a clue, big guy: I don’t own any sweatshirts.”_

And he remembered every sweet, quiet sigh that escaped the younger man when they were together, when nothing and no one else mattered, where they relished their quiet freedom to love and love and love.

Shiro swiped a hand across his face, a needlessly rough action to catch the tears that leaked out the corners of his eyes. He hadn’t felt so much in so long, not for himself. Fear, panic, anxiety, stress: those were commonplace to him, in the privacy of his own room, his own head. Those feelings left him cold and empty, tired and wanting no more. But the moment Keith said his name was like a torrent of liquid fire, or hot summer rain, and every time he thought his heart was full he somehow dug deeper and found room for more, and more still.

It was pure, painful relief, but there was nothing he could do about it. Not while a cryopod separated them, not while he still didn’t know just how hurt, how damaged Keith might be.

There had been little change in two days. Keith’s black bodysuit probably still had traces of blood upon it, and where they’d torn it open he could see the scars from the two stab wounds. His left side was still a mess of rebuilding muscle and sinew, a gory pink tangle trying to resolve itself. It didn’t bother Shiro to look at it, because in a cold, calculating sort of way, it told him Keith was alive, that the cryopod knew it and was working to heal him. He hadn’t spoken to Coran or Allura yet, asked for any details, nor had the Alteans approached him. He supposed, what with everything that had come to light, they were giving him space to settle into himself.

Except he couldn’t. The only way he could ever settle, with everything he remembered now, was to have Keith in his arms again, alive and breathing. He tried to sleep, but woke up screaming every time, every time a new scenario where he failed. Keith’s heart never starting again. Keith bleeding out on the floor, eyes wide and empty. Keith torn in three: sliced in half at the waist, torso cleaved in two from hip to opposite shoulder, calling his name, accusing him.

Now he was tired, wrung out, and his fraying edges made it easier for his more tempestuous heart to break past his usual cool and controlled demeanour. He _wanted_ to be angry. He wanted to be absolutely _furious_. He wanted to tear the universe apart and let it be damned.

But he took a deep breath, pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes as if they could force his tears back in. Then he stood, ignoring the ache in his back from spending so long on the floor. It had only been two days, but it was already customary for him to kiss his fingertips and touch them to the cryopod before leaving the room.

He needed air. He just didn’t know anymore where he could actually breathe.

Shiro wandered the halls of the quiet Castle, avoiding any of the common areas, still unwilling to interact with the other Paladins. It was stupid, he knew. They needed each other right now, and he should be there for them, but he didn’t think there was anything he could do or say to make this any easier, or any better. And he… he didn’t want to be the Black Paladin right now. He didn’t want to be their leader. He didn’t think he even wanted to be Shiro.

He wanted to be _Takashi_. God knew he missed that enough.

He came to a halt, suddenly unable to walk and hold back that ache in his chest at the same time. A breath in, and out, and another, and when he looked up and around, he found himself outside Keith’s door.

All his thoughts about who Keith was to him, and it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder if he still meant anything to Keith.

But he’d said his name, hadn’t he? Didn’t that mean something? Or had he said it because he thought he was dying, or already halfway to insanity?

Quickly, Shiro bit the inside of his cheek, making sure it hurt. No. He would _not_ think that. He had to believe Keith was going to be all right. That was how it was. They believed in each other, backed each other up. He wasn’t about to stop now.

Any other time, the idea of going into Keith’s room would have been an invasion of privacy, and he would have hauled the ass of anyone who breached that privacy. Two and a half days ago he’d have a stern lecture prepared about respecting boundaries.

Today, right now, this very moment, he ached so badly, needed to find an anchor so desperately. So he pressed a hand to the lock, and the door to the Red Paladin’s room slid open. He stepped in, and let the door slide shut behind him.

Shiro wasn’t sure what he expected to find, really. Keith had always been utilitarian, a leftover from years of having so little. The room was clean and uncluttered, save for a few books — from the Castle library, no doubt — in a small pile beside the bed. The desk housed a couple more books, and propped up open on yet another volume was what looked like an Altean to Galactic Common dictionary. There were a few sheets of scattered notes here and there, but nothing like the mess he recalled in the shack. So much more like his old studying habits back at the Garrison, and before then at Galaxy Academy.

Well. Until it was exam season. Then it was chaos. Post-It notes everywhere, sheets and pages pinned in places that made no sense, books lying where they’d been flung. At least three mugs of coffee at various stages of being consumed. Pens chewed to death. Pencils snapped in two.

The memory made Shiro smile. Every term he’d buy Keith another box of pencils, always the same ones: Mars Lumograph, 2Bs. Because he liked the way they smelled. It was ridiculous, but also ridiculously endearing, and Shiro knew he didn’t need to understand to make Keith happy.

Keith’s jacket hung over the back of the chair by the desk. Shiro had been there when he got it, had taken him into town to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. He’d thought it impractical, but Keith had looked so good in it even though he was smaller then. He’d finally grown into it, and it looked so much better on him now.

Now.

When he left for Kerberos, Keith had been shy of nineteen. He was past twenty now.

How much had Keith really changed? Could he even tell anymore? How much had he missed?

Shiro found himself suddenly overwhelmed, piecing past with recent history. He lowered himself onto Keith’s bed, tried to scan backwards in time, tried to find any trace of his Keith, the one he left behind, in the Red Paladin. Keith was always first to be by his side, as if tethered to him. The first to challenge his orders as much as he was first to agree with them. He was faster, stronger, but also more brittle, more… pained. Angrier, but so much more tired. Where was his starry-eyed sweetness? Where was his smile? When had his words become so cutting when they used to be so playful? When had the walls he had tireless worked to bring down gone up again, impenetrable as ever?

Abandoned on the pillows was Keith’s belt. Shiro remembered that. The same belt, the same set of pouches, that Keith often wore when they went hiking or climbing. One of the smaller pouches he remembered was missing — the one that contained his climbing chalk. He supposed there was little need for it out in space. But he wondered if the same things lived in the pouches now, the things that he remembered.

The dagger and its sheath were missing from the belt, where it would normally rest against the small of Keith’s back. Maybe Keith had it on him. Maybe it was with Coran, who’d stripped his armour. Maybe he should find out. 

Did this count as going through Keith’s things, if it was just checking that things were still the same?

Keith used to say Shiro was what kept him from going completely off the rails, kept him steady and centred. Shiro was slowly remembering that Keith, and only Keith, could skew his moral compass. And maybe that was a relief. Maybe it meant that whatever he did in the gladiator arena, whatever transgressions he committed as Champion, he did because he had a memory of one thing that mattered. Maybe at the time he did remember, and somehow he’d forgotten. Maybe there was a time he killed, and won, because he wanted to go home to Keith.

So if he could spill blood for Keith, was this so bad?

He popped open the first pouch, the right one, and Shiro noted every item that sat in each of their compartments, all still present: a Swiss Army knife, that ridiculous Leatherman multi-tool he’d bought him for his eighteenth birthday because Keith had seen one in a store in town and his eyes had lit up so much Shiro couldn’t not get it, a roll of duct tape, a set of carabiner clips and quick-draws, a palm-sized but powerful flashlight. A handful of hair ties. A pack of bobby pins.

Shiro couldn’t help but laugh, low and short, shaking his head: the dagger, the Swiss Army knife, and the multi-tool meant Keith walked around with at least _three_ blades upon his person. Without his Paladin armour. In a flying castle.

_What are you protecting yourself from, baby?_

He ran a hand over the other pouch, almost reverently, as he should, if it still contained what he remembered.

The door slid open before he could do anything with the belt — hide it, put it back where he found it, nothing at all — leaving him exposed and guilty.

“Shiro?”

He didn’t relax immediately at the sight of Pidge. He wanted to be glad to see her, because she’d hidden herself away for these two days, but he also knew there would be — and there was — tension between them after what happened. After all, he was the one who gave the order to separate her from Keith in the moment she was most desperate to be beside him.

“What are you doing here?”

Shiro opened his mouth, then closed it again. Looked at the belt pouch in his lap. Back up to Pidge. Her eyes held that same hard glint that she probably learned from Keith, if not her own brother Matt. Matt, though, often only posed an idle threat, while Keith’s eyes were like knives. Pidge was certainly more knife-like, standing there with the door now closed behind her, arms folded.

Inwardly, he was proud of how protective she was of Keith. Outwardly, it was enough to cow him, even momentarily.

“I… didn’t know where else to go.” And that was true. What he wanted to say, but didn’t, because he wasn’t ready, was, _“I want to be close to him.”_

Pidge hummed at his answer, stepped forward and lowered herself onto the bed beside him. She kept her posture rigid, unforgiving, refusing to look at him. “So you figured you’d go through his stuff?”

He could only shrug at that, because yes, he was wrong to do so, but also: yes, it was all he could think to do. “I guess… I wanted to know how much has changed. If anything has changed.”

Another hum, but a softening around the shoulders. Still looking anywhere but at him. “So. Has it?”

“I’m not sure.” That was also true. Because the room, the way everything sat, the contents of one pouch, told him his Keith lived here. But it wasn’t really the same Keith who stood beside him every day since the Blue Lion brought them across the universe to Arus. Or was it? He wished he knew. He wished he could ask. There were so many things he wanted to ask because there was so much he remembered.

 _Do you remember when I helped you take in your uniform, because you were so small? Do you remember the first time I helped cut your hair? Or when you cut mine? Do you remember running across the quad with this huge grin on your face with some of the highest scores the Academy had ever seen? Do you remember how we celebrated then? Or when you got sorted into Fighter Class? Do you remember breaking into the kitchens to steal extra jelly cups? Do you remember the first time we watched the stars together until the sun came up? Or when I first kissed you? When that thunderstorm broke over the shack and we ran outside to dance in the rain? Do you remember the first time we fucked, and then the first time we made love and learned the difference and I swore,_ I swore _I would never, ever leave you?_

_Do you still love me?_

“You’re an idiot.”

That hit him like a slap to the face. There were very few reasons for Pidge to say that and be right about it, and out of those there was one outstanding reason. Blinking at her, while she still refused to meet his eye, he asked, “Did you know?”

She shrugged, and the set of her shoulders slumped altogether. “I guessed. It’s not hard. I get that you forgot. What I don’t get is how you’re so blind.”

“I… Well. There was just so much happening,” he said, knowing anything he said would be weak against her. “I came back still so mixed up, and then all… _this_. There just hasn’t been time.”

Pidge said nothing at first, but he could hear a low growl coming from her, and still managed to be unready for the punch she threw at his shoulder. It hurt. Keith probably taught her that, too.

“Bull _shit_. There was _always_ time. We eat together. We train together. If your head wasn’t so far up your ass trying to be a leader instead of just being… I don’t know, whoever the fuck it was my brother knew, you’d have seen.” There was a shaky breath, a threat of tears, but still she refused to look at him. “If you’d just… seen him. Maybe you’d have remembered. And maybe he didn’t have to nearly die just so you would.”

Shiro heaved a deep breath, let it out slowly, closing his eyes. That was just it: that was all he’d been doing since everything came back. He’d been trying to go back over the last few months, trying to _see_. And every so often there would be a smile, or a look, or an aborted motion that was soft and private but that Keith kept in check. He’d known to laugh fondly every time Keith let out his impatient little huff, because that was familiar to some part of him. He’d known how to touch him.

And if he was honest, _of course_ he saw Keith. If he was just a man, and he was not one for lying, he’d been quietly falling for the Red Paladin as if he’d never known him before. At first it was his resourcefulness, his determination, his certainty of step. The way he fought was admirable, borderline frightening. His fire and strength of will was well beyond his years but fueled by some kind of arrogance that should only come with youth but it was more, so much more. And there was something terribly endearing about how blunt he was, how awkward he could be when he didn’t understand quite how to behave in a given situation.

Those things made his feelings easy to forgive. But then he’d find himself pausing whenever the lilt in Keith’s voice dropped into something almost delicate, or breathless when the light hit his eyes just so and the violet glowed amethyst and he’d swear he’d never seen anything so beautiful. He caught himself lingering too long on Keith’s form on the training deck: warming up, stretching, dodging, striking, fighting. And afterwards at rest: sipping from a water pouch, wiping the sweat off his brow, off the back of his neck, and Shiro found himself wondering what his skin tasted like, or if his hair was as soft as it looked.

He had no way of knowing that he’d fallen in love with someone he was already deeply in love with, and had been for years.

“Pidge,” he said, steeling himself, because he knew he was asking a lot, “I know you’re mad at me. And you have every right to be. But I need to know. I need to know what I missed. I need to know what I didn’t see.” _I need to know if he’s still my Keith._

She still wouldn’t look at him, eyes firmly set on her lap. But he watched her slide her glasses off, brush a hand over her eyes before she set them back on the bridge of her nose. She reached behind her, and pulled up a tablet. Keith’s tablet. He hadn’t even noticed it was there. But she didn’t activate it, only held it, as if it anchored her to Keith.

“Sometimes, it’s like there’s two of him,” she said, devoid of anger. “I guess you wouldn’t know if you’re not looking for it, but I see him in the morning sometimes. And it’s like, he packs away one version of him and goes about his day as another. Or maybe, that’s not right. More like, he hides away parts of him. Sometimes I can see it happen. I can see him picking up things in his head and putting them in a box and putting that box away. And then he’s Keith. Except he’s not. Because I’ve _seen_ Keith. I think we’ve all seen him, except you. We’ve all seen this person walking around in Keith’s skin but it’s actually really him but he’s always hiding.”

Shiro’s eyes fell on the tablet held tight in her hands, and reconciled something he’d always known with something he’d pretended to not know was happening. “He reads to you. When you can’t sleep.”

Pidge nodded.

“He did that for me, too,” Shiro admitted, smiling at the memory. “He always says he’s not much good at it, but it’s… comforting. Mostly Greek myths and the Scandinavian sagas.”

“He cries, you know.”

That stopped him. He should have known that Pidge would be merciless, that he wasn’t going to be able to soft-talk his way out of the blame she felt he deserved. That true to form, she would use all her information against him, because she could, because she loved Keith as much as he did. She was carrying Keith’s hurt, and she wanted him to know what that felt like.

“He thinks I don’t know,” she went on. “But it’s only ever in his sleep. Like it’s the only time he’s got all his stupid defences down and things just… fall out. And I can’t do anything because then he’ll know that I know. I just have to, wait it out. And he has bad dreams. I don’t — I don’t think they’re nightmares. They don’t seem scary, or violent, but he… He’s always calling for you. Like he’s lost. He calls you ‘Takashi’. And then he wakes up and he just… puts everything away and it’s like he never dreamed or cried and it’s _not fucking fair_ , Shiro.”

The breath that left him was deep and tremulous, an earthquake in his chest that shook his foundations and threatened to crush him. She was right: he’d been blind. A good leader would have seen that one of his own was in some kind of distress, that some kind of pastoral care was needed. He did it for Pidge, for Hunk, and especially Lance who was always so painfully homesick. Why not Keith? If he hadn’t forgotten, would he have known what to look for?

Of course. Of course he would. Just like he knew other things, like how to deal with Keith’s bad temper, or that he carried Pidge back to bed some nights, or that it wasn’t weird at all that he’d taught himself one-and-a-half new languages in the time they’d been up here. But he also simply _hadn’t known_.

Shiro was too wrung out to be angry at the Galra anymore, for everything they’d taken away from him. His eyes fell back to the unopened pouch in his lap, and he popped it open.

No. Nothing had changed.

A small leather-bound book slid out, worn and well-loved. Wrapped around it, keeping it secure, were two silver chains: one held a pendant that looked like a compass, the other were Shiro’s own dog tags.

_“Takashi, I can’t take these.”_

_“I want you to. So I know I’m still with you even while I’m millions of miles away from you.”_

_“God, you’re ridiculous.” He’d held his right hand up, light flashing silver. “_ This _was crazy enough, but these… Takashi.”_

_“Humour me,” he’d said, curling his arms around him, pressing him close. “Wear them until you get your own. You’re only a few months off and you’re going to ace the officer’s exams.”_

_“Well, when I do, and when you come back, you can have mine. I don’t… I don’t have anything to give you.”_

_“I don’t need anything more from you than all you already are, Keith.”_

Something squeezed Shiro’s heart at the sight of his dog tags. He thought about the young man who’d given them away, closed Keith’s smaller hand around them and clasping that hand tight with both his own. They’d been so happy, even if it was all in secret, even with rumours and speculation swirling around them. They’d treasured their privacy and their relationship, and had been looking forward to Keith’s advancement to officer so that they would no longer need to hide what they had. He’d been excited that when he got back from Kerberos, he’d get to see Keith in the green dress uniform, no longer the saffron-and-white of a cadet. And he’d lost count altogether of the times his hand drifted to his sternum, searching for those tags, and smiling, knowing that they were resting against Keith’s skin, nestled close to his heart.

“What’s that?” Pidge was pointing at the other chain, with the odd compass pendant. Shiro answered her wordless request by untangling both chains from the book, and letting her take it into her hand. It was a circle of silver, carved with the eight directions of a compass, but each line was crowned with a strange symbol.

“Keith told me it’s called Vegvísir,” Shiro said, eyeing the pendant in her hand but his own hands remained upon the book and his dog tags. “It’s an Icelandic magical stave, supposedly from the Viking age. It’s meant to help the bearer find their way through stormy weather, even when the way is not known. That, and the book, were given to him when he got his place at Galaxy Academy.”

“Sister Isolde?”

Shiro nodded, smiling at the sound of that name. “So he still talks about her. That’s… unsurprising, actually. And sweet.”

He felt Pidge come closer, shoulder brushing his arm, almost forgiving. Her hand reached across, falling on his own over the book. “He never… he never mentioned the book. Or the pendant. But yeah, he talks about her. I think he still misses her a lot.”

Again, he could only nod solemnly, humming an assent. He remembered.

He remembered hearing an argument outside the officer’s lounge, recognized Keith’s voice in a way he’d never heard before: high and angry yet panicked. He was standing in front of Commander Fokker, a whole head and a half taller than him but Keith had looked ready to climb him and deck him if it would help.

 _“You don’t understand! I need to — I need to be there. I can’t_ not _be there!”_

_“Kid, I’ve had cadets claim their fourth and fifth grandmothers kicked the bucket just so they can have a weekend joyride. And I happen to know that you’re on record to have been granted time off to visit this Sister Isolde only last month.”_

_“Because she asked for me! Because now she’s dead! I have to go!”_

That was when Shiro had stepped in. Assured Commander Fokker that Sister Isolde did exist, that she was important to the young cadet, and that he should be allowed to pay his respects. That if it helped at all, he would be more than happy to chaperone that weekend and report back regularly if it meant Keith could go. He would take full responsibility.

And that was how he’d found himself standing near the back of the gathering beside Keith, whose uniform never looked so crisp, a black band fastened around one arm to show his mourning. Keith never made any attempt to get closer to the group of other sisters and children, to listen to the final words being spoken for the woman who’d meant so much to him. Keith didn’t really believe in God; he didn’t think anything a priest said held any meaning to him, or to Sister Isolde, nor could any of it measure up to her.

Shiro remembered how Keith kept his eyes forward, not once wavering even as the gathering dispersed, as sobbing children left with their hands held by one sister or another. One or two of them stopped to acknowledge Keith with a sad kindness; most paid more attention to Shiro, who was an utter stranger. Then one woman, the oldest of them, clearly the orphanage’s Mother, stepped up to him, looked him up and down as if he was something that deeply displeased her, that she longed to get rid of.

He remembered her leaning close. _“No one will protect you now.”_

Keith hadn’t budged. Shoulders back, chin held high, eyes forward.

Only when they were truly alone had he stepped forward towards the new grave. He’d come empty-handed: he’d explained that Sister Isolde found little use for flowers and trinkets when it came to death. Whatever would she do with them? That was just how she was.

Shiro kept a respectable distance, watched as Keith looked down into the grave, then to the new gravestone. Watched him heave a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of the earth itself, close his eyes, tip his head back and release that sigh to the sky. Watched as he bent close to the gravestone, dropped a kiss to the top of it. Heard words he would never forget:

_“May your anger be forever righteous, so the Lord will always love you.”_

At those words, at the way he walked back to the foot of the grave, faced it, and threw the sharpest salute he ever would in his career, Shiro knew he was absolutely, undeniably in love with Keith Kogane.

He told Pidge all that, ignoring the quiet tears that had begun to fall against his will, against assumed odds because he had been sure he had none left. Pidge, in turn, remained silent, but had wrapped both her arms around him, forehead pressed into his bicep. At some point she’d released Keith’s tablet and set it on the floor so her hands could be free. Even though he was aware that she was warm, that she was alive, he felt nothing but a cold emptiness inside him where Keith should be, and it would not be remedied until he had him in his arms again.

He’d walked around with that space all these months, the solution in the room next to his all the while.

Together, he and Pidge opened the book, carefully and respectfully, to find a hand-written index on the first page. About two thirds of the items were listed in an elegant, practiced hand, the rest in a clumsier, younger hand with its own beauty. Sister Isolde’s, then Keith’s. Together they flicked through a collection of hand-written transcriptions of stories and poems; the most faded pages were of Oscar Wilde’s _The Happy Prince_. That was the first entry by Sister Isolde.

The first entry by Keith was _High Flight_ , by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

But on the last page by Sister Isolde, before Keith’s handwriting took over, laid a message that she might have written before she passed the book to him, to take with him to Galaxy Academy. There was no date, so perhaps they would never know.

_May your anger be righteous, so the Lord will love you for it. Whether upon this earth or in the heavens, you are worthy. Know this, and hell will have no power over you. Know this, and hell will fear you._

Eventually, both Shiro and Pidge laid down on the bed, curled into each other, both searching for Keith’s scent in the sheets and pillows. Eventually Pidge fell asleep, her quest to read to Keith temporarily forgotten, too heartsick to leave the bubble they’d made.

Shiro didn’t sleep. Only stared at the page open to him, near the end of the book.

In Keith’s handwriting, and he wondered if he still had the fountain pen he’d written everything in that book with, were the words _Patience yields focus_.

And then he wept with the shame of having forgotten, when Keith never, ever did.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, apologies for the long wait. This chapter was a beast to write, but we're all (mostly) in the present again, and back into the plot. 
> 
> You can see a version of Keith's pendant symbol [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegv%C3%ADsir), and here is a [link](http://www.skygod.com/quotes/highflight.html) to High Fight, written by a young pilot during WWII after flying the Spitfire for the very first time.
> 
> Edit to add: I had to go back and correct a GLARING continuity error on my part in this chapter, involving Keith's dagger. You may or may not have noticed - no one had pointed it out - but I sure did. Ooops.


	7. These Thoughts Aren't Mine

On the sixth day, Shiro received a summons from the Princess, asking him to come to the med bay. He tried not to run, not to get too excited, because he still knew and understood the reality of Keith’s injuries. But he hoped there was some change. He hoped there was good news.

There wasn’t.

 

 

 

Lance hadn’t meant to be near the med bay. He’d taken to wandering around the Castle at odd hours, unable to sleep for very long in any one spot. No one brought up the fact that blankets and cushions kept going missing, or were moving around. Most frequently, Lance slept — or tried to — in his room, the common room, the observatory, Blue’s hangar, Blue’s cockpit. And even with her shields up, with everything that Blue could protect him from, he couldn’t sleep. The longest bout of sleep he’d had in a week lasted all of four hours, and he was exhausted.

He knew it was just him. Everyone else was dealing, or at least, everyone else was sleeping. He was sure that even Shiro, who still screamed awake from time to time, who only seemed to know peace if he was curled on the hard floor next to Keith’s cryopod, was getting more than he was. And Lance couldn’t complain. He didn’t want to. If everyone else could cope, then so could he. He just wished he could understand what was happening. He wished he could explain to someone, anyone, what it was he was seeing and hearing.

Because whatever they were, they definitely weren’t dreams. Nightmares, certainly. Just someone else’s.

A roar — human, not lion — nearly had him stumbling over his own feet, pulling him out of his worn-out thoughts. Lance looked around, realizing he’d just passed the med bay, where he’d briefly heard Allura and Coran’s voices. But the roar belonged to neither of them.

There was a massive crash, and the sound of something hitting the wall hard, before another bellow sounded through the room and into the corridor. “NO!”

 _Shiro_.

The doors slid open, and Lance ducked out of the way as quickly as he could. He watched Shiro — thunderous, furious — stalk out of the med bay, footsteps quick and heavy, his right arm a deep, threatening glow. He’d never seen the Black Paladin so… _murderous_. That was the word that came to mind. He looked like he wanted to hunt something down and kill it. He looked like the famed and feared Champion. Lance almost didn’t want to know what it was that made him so angry.

A weight formed in his stomach. Keith. It had to do with Keith. But last he checked, Keith was at least healing: the ugly wound on his side was finally smoothing over, the only evidence he’d have of that injury would be the scars outlining where his flesh had torn. Was he not waking up? Six days was the longest any of them had been in a cryopod. Allura and Coran had been speaking in furtive whispers all week: what if there was a reason for it? What weren’t they telling them? What had they just told Shiro?

Before he could ponder any further, the med bay doors slid open again, and Lance tucked himself away once more. Alarmingly, it was Allura who had an arm around Coran, who looked utterly beaten. She was speaking so softly to him that Lance could hardly hear, but he saw Coran give the princess a resigned nod, before he allowed her to lead him away, the doors sliding shut again.

He waited, waited for their footsteps to fade away, waited until there was silence except for the familiar voice in his head that had been with him all week. Then he pushed himself away from the wall and let himself into the med bay.

Keith still hung silent and suspended, dreamless. Lance knew that much. When it had been his turn to watch over Shiro’s time in the pod, he’d noted the spikes in the charts whenever there was a furrowed brow or a silent cry. Hunk had told him that he’s shown similar activity when he’d been in the pod.

Keith’s showed an eerie silence, an almost absence.

Lance knew he wasn’t absent. He was very much there. Just not where he should be.

There was an upturned medical cart, its contents scattered across the floor. Thankfully nothing was broken, but Lance refrained from tidying it up; he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to know he’d been here, not yet. Especially not when, embedded about four inches into the wall, was a tablet. Shiro must have flung it with such force for it to stay there, like a blade in a slab of wood.

It was still lit. Flashing every so often with the damage it had taken, but it still clearly functioned.

The voice in his head got louder.

Never actual words. Just… hums and whispers, sighs. Like a voice asleep, murmuring unawares. Lance could almost sleep through those, if not for the fact that sometimes the voice came awake as if from a nightmare and screamed, crying out words that were incoherent, desperately coming through a thick fog. He might have considered himself insane, if that voice hadn’t sounded so much like Keith.

He moved closer to the flashing tablet in the wall. It was sparking now, probably close to dying altogether, so he scanned the screen quickly, trying to work out what it was showing that apparently signed its death warrant.

_Nonostoppleasestop_

“Oh. Oh my god.”

_StoppleaseI’msorryI’msosorryShiro_

Lance doubled over, palms pressed hard over his ears, wishing it was enough to block out the pained scream that followed the clearest words he’d heard all week. Swallowed sobs came after, sounds he knew were never vocalised, never reached the air, drowned utterly by the will to be silent. He fell hard against the wall, legs struggling to keep his back supported against it. The tablet blinked, then went dark, but Lance didn’t need it anymore to know.

He breathed, deep, in and out, in and out. The voice faded back, a small, tired whimper. Pulling away from the wall, he straightened himself and his resolve and bolted out of the room.

He needed to find Shiro.

 

 

 

“Begin training level six!”

The gladiator bot barely took three paces before Shiro put a hole through its chest, right arm a feverish bright purple. The two that followed lasted only marginally longer, before he took one out by the groin and twisted the other’s head off, imagining neck bones splintering like matchsticks.

He had vague memories of having done precisely that to other slaves that had been thrown into the arena with him. It used to sicken him, keep him awake at night. But not now. Now he wished he could go out there and do it for real. Over and over again.

Skipping to one side, he feinted away from a blow aimed at his head, slid behind the gladiator and punched a neat gap in its spine — if only there was an actual spine to grab, so he could rip it out and hoped that it hurt to hell and back — before he was already shoulder-barging another into a wall and clawing its eyes out.

He made a sound he hadn’t heard from himself in a long time: he _growled_.

Because how _dare_ they?

_How fucking dare they?_

“Restart training level six!”

Shiro realized, in a detached sort of way, that he’d been wrong. He thought he was never really angry with the Galra until he worked out that somehow his ordeal made him forget Keith. And that anger had unsettled him, because it was real. It wasn’t the steel of cold fear he felt whenever he stepped into the arena, not the false bravado he demonstrated when he grew successful and became Champion. He’d played at wanting blood in order to save Matt, all that time ago.

Now, kicking a gladiator into the wall, slicing another with the heat of his right hand in the exact same way that Galra blade would have torn Keith apart, he knew.

He could want blood, for the right reasons. He could be unprecedented degrees above base fury. He knew now that Keith was the reason he lived through the arena, because he fought and killed to survive, so he could go home, foolish as the notion had been at the time. He let his moral compass be skewed, because there was no true north for Shiro if it wasn’t Keith.

Right now, Keith lay still and silent, and knowing him, he would have not breathed a word to anyone about what happened on that warship. What had he done? How did he hide it, that even Hunk had no idea what had happened probably minutes before, in another part of the vessel? Was Keith going to just… do nothing? Keep quiet? _Pretend he was all right?_

Shiro’s boot slammed down into the stomach of another bot, and he reached down and tore its head off with a roar.

He’d been wrong. _This_ was anger. _This_ was the absence of morals, compass crushed in a bloodied fist under pain and rage and pain upon rage. He wanted this. Oh, he’d wanted it before, and perhaps it had been a naive, romantic gesture that he’d tear the universe apart for Keith.

No. Gladiator bots were just a poor substitute for the violence he craved to wreak right the hell now. Because he’d had enough. Just _enough_. He thought he could keep his head, be that excellent, confident commanding officer the Garrison trained him to be. At this moment he had the barest clarity to hope and pray that no officer of the Garrison of any rank would ever have to tear the flesh off a screaming teammate (best friend, right hand, lover, guiding light) just so they had a slim chance of survival. Just so they could lie there, unseeing, unspeaking, unwilling to spill secrets too dark.

Guiding light. North star. _Spitfire_.

And some Galra commander thought to try and snuff it out.

Shiro was only mildly, gently, aware of not only the number of times he’d run through the training level, but also the degree of violence he’d inflicted upon the gladiator bots. He knew it wasn’t in his nature to be so violent, but he’d made it so, nurtured it so that he would survive the arena. He just… _needed_ this. Needed to do this and get this out and maybe, _maybe_ he would be in the right frame of mind to be useful.

He’d taught Keith: _“Patience yields focus.”_

Keith had taught him: _“Be angry. Just put it somewhere useful.”_

God, how useful could he possibly be? What could he do, when all he wanted was to _undo?_

 _Just a little more_ , he told himself. _Get it out. Get it all out. Fight. Fight, fight, fight, and then you can protect. Fight so you can protect. Don’t stop, get it out, keep fighting. Protect him. You did it before, over and over and over, just for him, just so you could be with him again. Do it again, again, again. Kick, claw, fight. Never about you, it was never about you, go home to him, he will heal you._

Another gladiator bot came at him, and he wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed when a part of his mind went, _this one we’ll just behead_ , when the bot stopped mid-rush, and deactivated in a flash of light. Shiro nearly overbalanced when he found nothing to hit, whirled around to see what had ended his fight. Because he wasn’t done. It wasn’t enough.

_Keep fighting. Don’t stop. If you stop you die. If you die he dies. Fight. Get it out. Fight, fight, fight._

Lance stood by the door.

“Shiro. I need to talk to you.”

Shiro clenched his fists, bit back a scream. “Lance. This is _not_ a good time.” He felt a sick sort of satisfaction when he saw Lance falter, almost step back, because he knew he had never, ever, spoken in that tone to anyone on the team before, not even when he was keeping Lance in line. But the irritation grew within him when Lance seemed to refuse to leave, spinning and prickling like a sandstorm.

“No, no, look, I know it’s not a good time, but —” and Shiro could almost, almost want to back down and listen, almost consider quelling the violence in him and be the leader Lance clearly needed now, except, “— I know — I know what happened to Keith and I —”

There was no in-between moment. Lance was speaking, urgent and desperate in his speed and his hesitation, and then Lance was against a wall, a left forearm pressed against his throat, the hum of Galra tech singing high in the room. The Blue Paladin’s eyes were still wide with surprise, and if he weren’t so angry, Shiro might have felt pleased about that, that he hadn’t lost that burst of speed that made him seem to materialize next to his opponent before they were ready for him.

“Shiro! Wait, please! I can explain —!”

He didn’t want to hear it. He leaned harder into his arm, cutting off whatever Lance was going to say next, swallowing the feral noise in his throat. “You’re going to explain to me how you know what happened to Keith,” he spat out, eyes narrowing to slits, his whole body practically vibrating with fury. “Because either you were eavesdropping or you stole in and found data and neither of those are looking good for you right this moment.”

“No! No, I swear, it’s not like that!”

_Fight. Kill. Protect. Get home to him. Get home._

That odd thudding sound, Shiro slowly discerned, was the sound of Lance’s heels kicking off the wall behind him. Because his feet weren’t touching the ground. He ought to be concerned.

_They hurt Keith and you weren’t there. They hurt Keith and you weren’t there. Where were you? What good are you?_

“Then what _is_ it like, Lance?!” he roared, his right arm blazing ever brighter. “What the _hell_ do you know about Keith? _Nothing! None of you!_ Now tell me the truth or I swear to god I’ll —”

_He loved you and you weren’t there. He loved you. He loved you._

“HE’S IN MY HEAD, SHIRO!”

And the answer was so unexpected that everything went quiet. The hum of his hand. His own voice in his head. That odd thudding, because he’d let go of Lance and dropped him to the floor. Past the rush of anger and adrenaline, he could hear Lance breathing hard, whimpering — no, _sobbing_ — on the floor, knees against his chest and hands over his head. Shiro dared a glance behind him, and felt instant relief that the gladiator bots disappeared after being defeated, so there was no evidence of his carnage.

He lowered himself slowly, keeping his distance from Lance — _You held him by his throat, what were you thinking?_ — and sat back on his heels, hands on his knees where Lance can clearly see them. He knew how to make himself appear non-threatening: he’d done it so many times before, sharing cells with other captives, trying to placate them enough that they might share their food, or their company. Anything to help him remember he was human.

For a moment, he wondered if his actions would change Lance’s mind of that. If one display of rage negated all the humanity he’d tried to hold on to.

“Lance?”

Lance was still shaking, but the sobbing had stopped, and he was breathing through his nose, inhaling and exhaling steadily, until he looked to have some degree of control again. His knees relaxed, and one fell to the side, relaxing his posture, though his hands stayed clamped over his head, like he was trying to keep something out. Without looking up, his voice shuddered into the air. “He’s in my head. I hear him. I hear him all the time. I — I thought I was going nuts, you know? Because, god, what happened was so awful. Like, I expected… I expected the nightmares. And hearing him screaming in my head, or in my dreams. I’d be soulless if I didn’t but…”

Shiro didn’t move. He waited, listened.

“I know… what it was like, when I was in the pod. And when you were in there, I kinda… hung around. I wanted to see what everyone else saw, right?” There was a nervous laugh, but his head still wouldn’t come up, eyes still wouldn’t rise to meet Shiro’s. “I had dreams. I know I did. You had nightmares. Keith… there’s nothing. Like he’s not there. But he is. Just… not where he should be? Does that make sense?”

Shiro swallowed, trying to not think of the nightmares he’d had then, but then remembering: had Keith been there, waiting? What had he looked like? Had he been as fraught as he himself felt now? “Lance, I’m not sure I understand. Why — why do you think you’re hearing Keith?”

Because PTSD was a thing. PTSD was _his_ thing. It was something he’d only begun to deal with, something he knew he’d be dealing with probably for the rest of his life. But he at least understood where it could come from, what sort of trauma. He still had nightmares where he heard the dying cries of his opponents as he survived and survived and refused to die, where he heard his own screams, or Haggar’s voice taunting him. He was still listing down his triggers, figuring out ways to avoid them or cope with them when they hit.

So maybe it was happening to Lance, too?

“I… I know it’s him. I know it’s him because when I’m asleep, I have — they’re not my dreams, Shiro. They’re _his_. And when I’m awake, he’s still there, in my head, like he’s trying to reach us. Or me. I don’t know. I don’t know why he’s come to me. I just know he’s not dead, he’s not. He’s just… not where he should be. I know I said that already, but that’s… that’s the only way I can explain it.”

Shiro sat still, dumbstruck. This was nothing like what he thought it was. This was…

“Okay, wait, slow down a little,” he said, keeping his tone gentle, his hands still exactly where Lance could see them. “How long has this been going on? And… what do you mean, you’re having his dreams?”

At last, Lance lifted his head, folded his arms over his knee so he could rest his chin on them. He looked so very young despite the tired lines around his eyes from all the sleep lost. Sometimes Shiro forgot that. That Lance was young, the second youngest of them and yet he pulled himself up stronger and harder than any of them. He’d seen Lance big brother Hunk and Pidge, and sometimes even Keith, when he thought no one could see, despite being so young. Hell, the number of times Lance had tried to cheer _him_ up, get him to lighten up from his duties as team leader.

And here he was, tall lanky body curled small, tired, _young_.

“I wasn’t on that ship,” he started. “You and I both know I wasn’t on that ship, when it happened. But I have nightmares of that room, Shiro. I have…” Lance heaved a deep breath, swallowed, exhaled, and Shiro tried to keep his hands still and not reach out to him. “I saw the fight. The Galra commander. I saw him overpower Keith, or me, or… it’s like an out-of-body experience but I’m also the body? And Hunk doesn’t know, so Keith must have not made a sound. But in those dreams he’s _screaming_ , Shiro. He’s… scared and in pain and he’s begging and saying sorry and calling for you.”

Lance made a strangled sort of sound then, slamming his hand over his mouth like he was trying to stop himself from throwing up. And Shiro couldn’t blame him. He’d felt sick, too, when he first read Coran’s report. Sick, then furious. But he didn’t know what to do with this. He was as lost as Lance looked.

“And… when did you have the dream first?”

“The second night.”

Shiro slowly raised one hand to his eyes, pressing hard against them, against the grief that was threatening to resurface. _God_.

“I thought I was going crazy,” Lance went on. “Like, why would I dream of something so… horrible, happening to him? I don’t hate him! I’ve never hated him! And even if I did, I’d never wish that on him, or anyone! But they keep happening, and the only reason I didn’t think I was crazy?” He laughed then, dry and humourless. “I started hearing him when I was awake. He’s not… saying anything. It’s like, I’m listening to him sleep, but it’s a restless sleep. Murmurs and sighs and stuff. But sometimes he wakes up like he’d had a nightmare and that scares the shit out of me.” The Blue Paladin sighed, pulled his knees up together again and hugged them tight, knuckles whitening. “I won’t lie: I saw how angry you were. I had no idea why but it had to be because of Keith, and I was _scared_ , okay? So yeah, I did go in the med bay, and I saw the tablet. But I didn’t need to, because just now was the clearest I’d ever heard his voice while awake. I… didn’t have to know what was on the tablet to know what happened. But I’m sorry. I really am. I didn’t mean to.”

“I know you didn’t, Lance,” Shiro said at last, lowering his hand. Lance had his head down again, so Shiro carefully reached out and placed his hand on his shoulder, rubbing it gently. “And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t… I shouldn’t have attacked you like that. I don’t know what came over me, I —”

Lance held a hand up. “Dude. If I found out that someone I loved was… if that ever happened to them, I’d be livid, too. Believe me, I get it. I’m not hurt, I promise.” He laid that hand over Shiro’s own on his shoulder, as ever rising up, the good brother taking charge of the turmoil they were both feeling. It made Shiro proud, just as he was of Pidge, that his team could come together and stand up for each other so strongly.

“But Lance… you said this started on the second night after everything. You could have said something sooner. We could have helped.”

The Blue Paladin shook his head. “What, and you guys would believe that I’m having violent dreams of shit happening to Keith, and hearing his voice all the time? I feel _sick_ , Shiro. I feel like, I don’t know Keith at all, and I wish I knew more because, fuck, he shouldn’t have had to go through all that alone. But I guess, at least he won’t be alone this time.”

Shiro felt the air punched out of his lungs, a sledgehammer to his heart. He pulled his hand away from Lance, suddenly horrified. “ _This time?_ Lance?”

Lance’s eyes were wide, guilt and fear shining in them. He drew back, pressing harder into the wall behind him with nowhere else to go.

“Lance,” and Shiro could hear the desperate tone of his own voice, the verge of breaking. “What… please. You need to tell me. _Please_.”

It looked as if Lance was just coming to an understanding himself, as if something just slotted into place and an awful, awful truth had come to light. He suddenly scrambled to his feet, nearly tripping over himself. “Oh god I need to throw up.”

Shiro just about leaned out of the way, watched as Lance raced to the other end of the room where they kept the water pouches and a disposal bin. He winced as he heard Lance’s breakfast hit the bottom of the bin, and slowly rose to his feet to go to him.

He grabbed one of the towels they used post-training as well as a water pouch, crouched low by Lance and rubbed his back as he was reduced to dry, empty heaves. Eventually, Lance flopped down into a heap, braced on his hands and knees. Shiro helped him lean against the wall, handed him the towel and water. He waited while Lance took a deep sip, spit it out into the bin, drank the rest, wiped himself down. Curled into himself again, knees close, arms folded, head down.

Shiro could hear muffled curses in between ragged breaths.

“Fuck,” Lance bit out, eyes screwed shut. “Oh fucking _hell_ , Shiro.”

Again, Shiro waited. He didn’t want to, but he had to, ignoring the cold hard knot that was forming in his stomach.

“If… if what happened on that Galra ship was real, then… oh god.” Lance was crying now, but his expression was hard, and it was familiar.

Sick, then furious.

“There were rumours,” he said, an unsettling coldness in his voice. “After Kerberos launched, some guys were talking trash, about wrecking your records, so when you came back you weren’t going to look so great anymore. They were just saying stuff, trying to ruin your rep by saying you… did things, to get to where you were. As if everyone hadn’t seen you fly by then, you know?”

Shiro knew. He’d always known. Being the Garrison Golden Boy had more issues than it had perks, and the trash talking was one of them. He’d heard it all: cheating, sexual favours, whoring himself out. And he had always regretted that by associating so closely with Keith, who he knew would one day surpass him, he’d exposed him to the same unsavoury jealousy and pettiness that hard work and talent gained. But Keith hadn’t cared, because Keith never cared for the opinions of people unimportant to him. And besides, he’d said, there were two truths to be gleaned from the rumours: he and Shiro were the best of the Garrison, and they were, in fact, sleeping with each other. Hiding in plain sight had worked for them.

“But then the rumours got nasty. And they were about Keith, because the officer’s exams were coming up and everyone knew Keith would ace them and he’d be as young as you were when you did it. I —” Lance clenched a fist until it shook, then unclenched, slapping the palm hard on his knee. “I hate that I bought into those rumours. I do. I hate that I was so… jealous that I bought those lies. They didn’t know Keith, didn’t know anything about him. The things they said...”

Lance swiped a hand hard across his face, wiping tears away even though more came. He was angry, that much was now clear. “Then, Keith was supposed to do a flight demo in the simulators. But he didn’t show up. One of the other officers, I think it was Sterling, came in to say Keith wasn’t well, and he took over instead. Which I thought, you know. Whatever, right? People get sick. But then the same guys who were trashing you, they said they _had_ him. That they —” He stifled a heave, pale and drawn but still so angry. “They said, _‘why should Shirogane have all the fun?’_ and I didn’t want to hear anymore. I just… I quit those rumours.”

_Why should Shirogane have all the fun?_

The cold knot in his stomach melted into a molten ball of fury. He could almost hear that voice. He knew it. He knew _them_.

“Lance,” he said, low and careful. “Were they true?”

It took a moment, and Lance broke down into pained sobs, fresh hot tears streaming down his face. His hands clawed at his hair, and Shiro grabbed those hands, pulled them away, because he knew the desire to hurt something in rage, and he didn’t want Lance to hurt himself. He held them, close and firm, and asked again. “Were they true? Tell me.”

“I saw the room,” he whimpered. “I saw it just like I saw the room on the Galra ship. The old storage room in the back of the gym, where they dumped all the old camping gear. It was there. Four of them. It was real. They held him down and gagged him and he was screaming and it was _real_ , Shiro. It happened and _no one knew!_ No one except… me.” The notion hit Lance like a bucket of cold water, and wide-eyed he scrambled up to his knees. “I need to throw up again.”

Shiro let him, barely hearing the retching over the roaring in his ears.

He’d left Keith behind. They’d fought, however briefly, about that, about Kerberos. They’d both loved the opportunity but hated that it would keep them apart. They made the best of it as they could: Shiro would come home to Officer Kogane, with his own tags and smart olive green uniform and his own set of responsibilities and they would no longer have to hide their relationship because they would have the same rank. They’d be allowed shared quarters. They’d talked about what the separation would gain the both of them, the future they would build.

Someone tried to take that future from him. From Keith. He couldn’t give a shit about what anyone said about him, but he would happily take the consequences for his actions should anyone say a word against Keith’s character and honour.

But he hadn’t been there.

_They hurt him. He loved you and you weren’t there._

“Shiro.”

He blinked, and found Lance kneeling in front of him, his hands in the younger man’s grip, thumbs rubbing steady circles on the back of them. He took a breath, and vowed to always remind Lance of this moment any time he ever doubted himself again.

“Shiro, I don’t know why this is happening. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think… I think Keith needs help. He needs our help. He needs us.”

Shiro closed his eyes, nodded, opened them again. He was met with a steely blue gaze, the expression of a man who would go to the ends of the world for his brother. For any of his newfound siblings. Just as Shiro would for the man he loved more than life itself.

“We’ll be there for him. We will,” he said. “Right now, we need to talk to Allura. We need to find out why you’re hearing him, and how we can help him.”

Lance bit his lip, looked away before coming back to meet Shiro’s eyes. “Do you think we can? He… he’s so scared, Shiro. I don’t know what’s going on but he’s so scared.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lance. We’ll do everything it takes. And we’ll make sure he never has be scared again.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am so sorry that I've been away so long from this fic. A lot has been going on in real life since I last updated, and the best I could do was the other, shorter fics that I've written in between. Please believe me when I tell you that getting comments and kudos in the interim, however brief, have helped me immensely, and made me want to keep going, and keep doing my best for this fic. 
> 
> Secondly, with this chapter, I will have written a total of nearly 40k for the VLD fandom. That's not something I've ever imagined doing, and certainly not within these 9 months. If not for all the support and encouragement and kindness this fandom gives me, I wouldn't be here. So thank you, so very much. 
> 
> Now that we're fully into the swing of present plot, hopefully chapters should come a little more frequently than this break. I make no promises, but I am still here, writing always.


End file.
